Since madness was considered to be curable, many treatments were prescribed. George III was given what was called ‘mad physic’ which caused inflammation, eruptions and violent disorders. The famous Dr Jenner treated his mad patients by ‘keeping them sick with tartar emetic’ and camphor water. Some spas were considered to be healthful. A madwoman, Mrs Jessop, was cured by the waters at Buxton; the 1st earl of Egmont reported that ‘she is now very orderly behaved and has got a lover’.
George III had a naturally hurried and impulsive manner which the pressing affairs of state could only intensify. He also spoke of ‘the anxiety I have for the success of my endeavours to fit my children for the various stations they may fill, and that they may be useful and a credit to their family’. He had broken down completely in the autumn of 1788 and it was reported that ‘his case must be hopeless’.
The king seized his eldest son by the throat and threw him against a wall, demanding who it was that had forbidden him to whisper. Captain Jack Payne, comptroller of the prince of Wales’s household, let it be known that the monarch awoke in his bed ‘with all the gestures and ravings of the most confirmed maniac’; he howled like a dog and spoke distractedly about matters of religion. Fanny Burney met him by chance in Kew Gardens in February 1789; he had been taken for the air, and she reported that he lost control of his speech repeating the word ‘No!’ a hundred times. He talked about Handel and tried to sing the composer’s oratorios ‘in a voice so dreadfully hoarse that the sound was terrible’. Eventually he was locked in his room and tied to his bed at night. By the end of the year he had become so violent that he was confined to a straitjacket. He was also on occasions beaten with sticks, no doubt according to the much earlier belief that the ‘devils’ within him could be expelled by rods and violence. Yet after this treatment of enforced restraint, he seemed to make a full recovery. He relapsed at the beginning of 1801 but was soon considered to be fit for rule again even though he was on many occasions irritable and agitated.
For George III, as for Lear, much attention was paid to the concept of the king’s ‘two bodies’. One was the ‘body natural’ as opposed to the ‘body politic’. The natural body was susceptible to all the infirmities of the human condition, but the body politic was free from all defects or weakness and could not be affected by the natural body. It was the sovereign will of the nation incarnate. That is why Garrick felt able to project royal dignity into the role even while enacting all the symptoms of mental distress.
Charity asylums were established in the eighteenth century with the purpose of healing the deranged. The rich in particular were happy to consign their mad relations to private care so that those out of mind could also be kept out of sight. The inmates were essentially trapped in a prison where chains, manacles, leg-locks and handcuffs could be employed with impunity. It was believed that the untamed maniac was not susceptible to bodily disease so that Thomas Willis, in his Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes, could recommend ‘severe government and discipline’ without considering the physical consequences.
This could of course be the stuff of entertainment, and until 1770 Bedlam, the most famous of all asylums, was open to casual visitors. In the following year the hero of that quintessentially eighteenth-century text, Henry MacKenzie’s The Man of Feeling, observed: ‘I think it an inhuman practice to expose the greatest misery with which our nature is afflicted to every idle visitant who can afford a trifling perquisite to the keeper.’
The madness of King George of course brought back a reign of tears. When the lord chancellor, Thurlow, visited the mad monarch ‘the tears rolled down his cheeks, and his feet had difficulty to support him’. The queen was drowned in tears, and the members of the royal household ‘all cried, even bitterly, as they looked on’. It was no better when he recovered. Fanny Burney, on hearing the good news, confided to a friend that ‘I assure you, I cried twenty times in the day’.
In the autumn of 1810, after the death of a favourite daughter, the king once more slid into mania and his condition became irreparable. He had now become at times ‘so violent that correction had been necessary and he is confined’. One of his doctors, Sir Henry Halford, concluded that George III was ‘totally lost as to mind, conversing with imaginary personages’. One member of the court reported that the king ‘was no longer treated as a human being. His body was immediately encased in a machine which left no liberty of motion. He was sometimes chained to a stake. He was frequently beaten and starved, and at best he was kept in subjection by menacing and violent language.’ Wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before a king? He had been the great English monarch of the latter part of the eighteenth century. An engraving of him, with long beard and long hair, bears an uncanny resemblance to the images of King Lear by Benjamin Wilson and Benjamin West.
30
The beast and the whore
William Pitt the younger was the minister most concerned with, and identified by, the war against newly revolutionary France. He did not believe in boards and committees; he was the sole agent. One bureaucrat of the Admiralty noted that ‘Mr Pitt does all the material business at his own house, signs the papers, and then two other Lords sign them of course’. Pitt himself claimed that ‘there can be no rivalry or division of power. That power must rest in the person generally called the First Minister’; he added that the first minister ought to be in charge of finances as well as strategy. This management worked well in practice and the tremulous king found few instances of what he called ‘anything unpleasant’ between himself and the administration.
The war of 1795 consisted of stalemate followed by disappointment. The situation on land was muddled and confused by the claims and counter-claims of England and its allies; the Austrians, the Dutch, the Prussians and the others failed to press their advantage home. The Prussians were the first to sign a peace treaty with the French. The Dutch were the first to surrender to the French, ceding the left bank of the Rhine to their erstwhile enemy; Holland followed a month later. In the following year, Spain also changed sides. It was imperative, therefore, that Austria remained in the war on the British side; Russia hardly counted. The prospect before Pitt was of a lonely landlocked war with the maritime power of England unable to sway the balance of Europe. In any case France now had three navies, its own as well as those of Holland and of Spain. The world was turned upside down.
In 1796 Napoleon, perhaps best known at this time for the capture of Toulon from British forces, surprised the world still further with his lightning Italian campaign, urging his troops ever further north and closer to the principal enemy of Austria. ‘Soldiers!’ he told his troops at Nice near the frontier with Piedmont. ‘You are almost naked, half starved; the government owes you much and can give you nothing. Your patience and courage in the midst of these rocks are admirable; but they reflect no splendour on your arms. I am about to conduct you into the most fertile plains on earth; fertile provinces, opulent cities, will soon be in your power; there you will find rich harvests, honour, and glory . . . Will you fail in courage?’ This is the language of Buonaparte, at once curt and magniloquent.
He conquered Piedmont, setting up the municipal republic of Alba in the process, before crossing the Adda, a tributary of the River Po, and scattering the Austrian army at Lodi in Lombardy. This victory was a singular event in Napoleon’s career and he said it was the moment when he first dreamed of world glory; it came as an annunciation.
Dangers pressed upon England from every direction. At the end of 1796 the French had launched an invasion force upon Bantry Bay in support of the United Irishmen. These were the men who hoped and believed that they could bring under one banner the Irish dissenters and the Catholics, equally oppressed by the members of the Protestant Ascendancy, who might then become a revolutionary force under French leadership. The invaders had even brought French military uniforms for their Irish allies to wear on their anticipated march to Dublin. Great storms and treacherous seas dispelled any hope of success. Yet the fac
t that the French had sailed so far, and had in the process broken through an English naval blockade, had alerted Pitt and his colleagues to further French adventures. On 25 February 1797, news reached London that some French troops had landed at Fishguard Bay in Pembrokeshire; it was in truth a forlorn hope, the soldiers having surrendered to the local militia.
The incursions bred rumour, and rumour created fear, and fear easily degenerated into panic. Napoleon was on his way! A run on the banks proved fatal, since they did not hold enough bullion to meet their commitments; the Bank of England was obliged to suspend cash payments and issue notes of £1 and £2 as legal tender. A rhyme passed through the streets:
So of Pitt and of England
Men say without vapour
How he found it of gold
And left it of paper.
The possibility of French intervention once more ignited the hopes of the United Irishmen, who began to arm and to drill the peasantry. But there were dangers of insurrection even closer to home. A naval mutiny began at Spithead in the middle of April; the sailors’ grievances included low pay and prolonged periods at sea. Within a week their undoubtedly legitimate demands were met, and the admiral of the fleet was rowed from ship to ship with the king’s free pardon in his hand. In the following month the sailors of the north fleet, no doubt emboldened by the actions of their colleagues, mutinied at the Nore. A fighting address was read to the delegates from the different ships, in which it was stated that ‘the Age of Reason has at length revolved. Long have we been endeavouring to find ourselves men. We now find ourselves so. We will be treated as such.’
They were perhaps more determined and more dangerous than the sailors of Spithead, and at one stage managed to blockade the Thames; but their revolt was suppressed and their leader, Richard Parker, hanged on board his ship. Parker blamed his own men for their fickleness and divided opinions, calling them ‘cowardly, selfish and ungrateful’. Reports circulated that they had in fact been instigated by members of the United Irishmen and of other revolutionary groups, but no solid evidence has ever been offered.
Meanwhile Napoleon Buonaparte had advanced onto the soil of Austria. At the beginning of April 1797, he marched his army north until they reached the town of Leoben, just 90 miles from Vienna, where an armistice was quickly followed by a preliminary peace treaty between France and the Holy Roman Empire (now dominated by Austria and Prussia) in which each side agreed not to interfere in the domestic affairs of the other. Certain secret clauses surrendered Austrian possessions in the Mediterranean and the Adriatic, as well as the Austrian Netherlands, while Buonaparte magnanimously gave Venice to the Austrian emperor, thus blotting out the watery city’s thousand years of independent existence. ‘La Serenissima’ never recovered from the blow.
It was the peace that the French people had craved. Unfortunately it left England alone on the stage of the world. There were attempts by Pitt and his ministers to reach some form of treaty with Paris, but their efforts were rebuffed. The first coalition against Napoleon had failed.
The personal success of Buonaparte, from his first days as a corporal, had by no means been guaranteed. Yet the combination of skill, luck and fortitude led him forward. He was in particular an inspired strategist and tactician. It is well known that he relied upon artillery rather than infantry and muskets; a massive and deafening bombardment would be followed by rapid sorties, which were in turn succeeded by the assaults of cavalry and infantry. It was not simply the manpower that won the victories, it was the spirit of the French army that under the leadership of Buonaparte became a highly flexible and responsive machine for warfare. The Austrians and Prussians, under different styles of leadership, seemed to be woefully old fashioned.
Buonaparte had a few simple rules. The lines of supply and communication must always be clear. Always attack. Never remain on the defensive. Timing was all important. He had a master plan in his head for each battle that he conceived in precise detail. He tried to leave nothing to chance, but he was able to improvise at dangerous moments. He was a bold man, none bolder, but he was also an opportunist who acted decisively when circumstances were favourable. ‘Accident, hazard, chance, call it what you may,’ he once said, ‘a mystery to ordinary minds, becomes a reality to superior men.’ He knew himself to be one of those ‘superior men’ who can bend the world to their will; he worked tirelessly, and his decisiveness was combined with determination. One conquest or one battle was only a preliminary to the next; he was always advancing in order to extend his dominion. He told his soldiers that ‘our task is not to defend our frontiers, but to invade the territory of our foes’. It was to be war forever.
His large grey eyes were almost expressionless but an old French general confessed: ‘I tremble like a child when I approach him.’ Most significantly he had the ferocious desire to win which he was able to impart to his soldiers. ‘You must speak to the soul’, he said. Hegel glimpsed Napoleon riding through the streets of the city of Jena just before the battle of that region and observed that he had seen ‘the world-soul . . . astride a horse’.
Away from Buonaparte’s campaigns on land, Britain made gains at sea. In February 1797 the French and Spanish fleets were defeated off Cape St Vincent by Sir John Jervis while nine months later Admiral Duncan defeated the Dutch at the battle of Camperdown. After two peace missions under the leadership of Lord Malmesbury were rejected by the French, serious proposals were made to abandon the land campaign and to extend the mastery of the sea by picking up colonial treasure and colonial possessions wherever they offered themselves. But that smacked of defeatism. There was still a widespread desire to continue the struggle, and when Pitt sat down after a spirited speech to rouse the nation the Commons rose and sang ‘Britons, strike home!’ Pitt also declared, in words that would have cheered Edmund Burke, that neither truces nor treaties could curb France’s ‘unrelenting spirit’ in ‘the subversion of every state into which, either by force or fraud, their arms could penetrate’.
So unabated war continued. This aggressive and uncompromising spirit dismayed those liberal Whigs who still saw some good in the revolution and the revolutionary spirit. They decided simply to secede or, more accurately, to walk away. They got up from their benches and left, with the simple understanding that nothing they could say or do would change the course of the administration. Now that Pitt had acquired the support of the ‘moderate’ Whigs, in return, he was for all practical purposes unassailable. So why should the ‘liberals’ go to the trouble of travelling to Westminster where their voices would not be heard? It was perhaps a sensible solution but it did not endear Fox and his friends to the political world; they were accused of lacking political courage, let alone loyalty, and putting their own interests above the proper working of government. Some of them did not stay away indefinitely and Fox himself spoke three or four times in the next couple of years, but their absence was a great blow to the national cause of reform.
War required money, of course, and all Pitt’s efforts were bent on providing revenue. He had already taxed bricks and sugar, spirits and tea, but now he hit upon the bold solution of dividing all taxpayers into three categories in accordance with their ability to pay; the measure became known as the Triple Assessment, and was based upon what was called ‘consumed property’ such as watches, carriages and windows (an earlier window tax had been introduced in 1696). This was a tax on expenditure but there was another prospect which intrigued him with its possibilities. He hinted at it in the Triple Assessment where it was agreed that a person might choose instead to pay a tax on his income. In the following year he introduced a graduated tax on incomes of over £60 per year and, despite the expected storm of outrage over the threatened liberties of the people, it was accepted. Yet it endured only as long as the war, after which all the records of the tax office were destroyed. Such was the depth of feeling about the action of ‘spying’ into the financial affairs of the people.
The shadow of Buonaparte was never very far away. He w
as the reason why the taxes were being imposed. In the winter of 1797 his forces took up position along the French coastline with the clear purpose of invasion. In response the administration called upon local officials to question every eligible male about his ability and willingness to take up arms. In the spring of 1798, in what had now become a predictable response, certain members of the English radical societies were taken up and detained. Five men were arrested at Margate just as they were about to embark for France. William Blake wrote in the margin of a book, ‘To defend the Bible in this year 1798 would cost a man his life. The Beast and the Whore rule without control.’ The fear of invasion lasted throughout the spring and summer of the year, until at last it became clear that Buonaparte had another destination in mind.
The atmosphere of extreme peril encouraged the United Irishmen to attempt rebellion once again in the spring of 1798. It acquired the name of ‘the great rebellion’ but in truth it was a badly organized and somewhat incoherent affair that was quickly put down. But the revolutionary inclinations of certain Irishmen, and the deep dissatisfaction of many others, led the English administration to believe that the best solution to the continuing problem was a union between the two countries. Fraught with difficulties though it was, and regarded with deep suspicion both by the king and by the Dublin parliament, it was pushed and pulled through the legislatures of Westminster and Dublin for two years with much argument, threats, rhetoric and money. The act of union with Scotland in 1707 had been purchased by bribes to the Scots, now the union with Ireland was expedited by bribes to the Irish; it could be said that the United Kingdom had been conceived in a pot of gold. The new union was not welcomed by all participants. Henry Grattan, the great Irish moderate, said of his nation: ‘I see her in a swoon, but she is not dead – though in her tomb she lies helpless and motionless, still there is on her lips a spirit of life, and on her cheek a glow of beauty.’
Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4 Page 38
