A History of Britain, Volume 3

by Simon Schama

  pursuing a plan, which has drawn on him the curse of thousands, and made his estate a scene of desolation: his farms are in the hands of a few men, to whom the sons of the old tenants are either forced to be servants, or to leave the country to get their bread elsewhere. The village, large and once populous, is reduced to about eight families; a dreary silence reigns over their deserted fields; the farm houses, once the seats of cheerful smiling industry, now useless, are falling in ruins around him; his tenants are merchants and engrossers, proud, lazy, luxurious, insolent, and spurning the hand which feeds them.

  The complaints and laments were, of course, unrealistically nostalgic for a bucolic utopia of caring parsons, avuncular squires and humane magistrates that had never existed except as an imaginary counter-example to the iron laws of country property. But the wishful quality of this fantasy rural past did not prevent those who wept for its passing in verse and prose from rising to the most extraordinary eloquence in their protest, and from exercising an almost hypnotic influence on a generation yearning to respond to the call for social affection. The most powerful of all those verse polemics came from the prolific pen of Oliver Goldsmith, born in County Longford, Ireland, much travelled, often ruinously hard up, but finally in the 1760s arrived at metropolitan fame and fortune, and admitted to the select company of the Literary Club, along with Sir Joshua Reynolds, Dr Johnson and James Boswell. Goldsmith’s earlier poem ‘The Traveller’ had already put in a poetic nutshell his retort to those who justified what was being done in the country by the fact that it was all perfectly legal and above board:

  Each wanton judge new penal statutes draw

  Laws grind the poor and rich men rule the law.

  In 1769, a year before Thicknesse produced his shocking image of starvation in Hertfordshire, Goldsmith published his long poem The Deserted Village, one of the greatest of all verse laments for the death of a dream hamlet – ‘sweet Auburn’.

  loveliest of the lawn,

  Thy sports are fled and all thy charms withdrawn;

  Amidst thy bowers, the tyrant’s hand is seen,

  And desolation saddens all thy green:

  One only master grasps the whole domain,

  And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain.

  Goldsmith’s couplets wander around the scenery of the dream, stopping at all the places and people that had made it a community. He visits the ‘village preacher’s modest mansion’:

  The long-remember’d beggar was his guest,

  Whose beard descending swept his aged breast;

  The ruined spendthrift, now no longer proud,

  Claimed kindred there and had his claims allowed;

  The broken soldier, kindly bade to stay …

  the schoolmaster and, not least, the inn where ‘nut-brown draughts’ were served, but which was much more than just an alehouse:

  Thither no more the peasant shall repair

  To sweet oblivion of his daily care;

  No more the farmer’s news, the barber’s tale,

  No more the woodman’s ballad shall prevail,

  No more the smith his dusky brow shall clear,

  Relax his ponderous strength and lean to hear;

  The host himself no longer shall be found

  Careful to see the mantling bliss go round;

  Nor the coy maid, half willing to be pressed,

  Shall kiss the cup to pass it to the rest.

  Departing from his forlorn tour of the ghost world of ‘Auburn’, Goldsmith then turns to face the contemporary, commercial England that has engineered this desolation:

  Ye friends to truth, ye statesmen, who survey

  The rich man’s joys increase, the poor’s decay,

  ’Tis yours to judge, how wide the limits stand

  Between a splendid and a happy land.

  Proud swells the tide with loads of freighted ore,

  And shouting Folly hails them from her shore;

  … the man of wealth and pride

  Takes up a space that many poor supplied;

  Space for his lake, his park’s extended bounds,

  Space for his horses, equipage and hounds;

  The robe that wraps his limbs in silken sloth

  Has robbed the neighbouring fields of half their growth.

  Justified or not, there is no question that Goldsmith’s rhymed accusation had an immense influence on late 18th-century public opinion. It affected moralizing critics like Bewick and nostalgic Tories like Dr Johnson, both of whom mistrusted the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of the landowning oligarchs of England. The country came out of the fiery years of food riots, troop mobilizations and hangings with its institutions intact but with its faith in the paternalism and even the moral legitimacy of the aristocracy, the judiciary, shaken. Only King George III himself, the first farmer of the country and manifestly a walking embodiment of the touted virtues of simplicity, honesty and sincerity, escaped the increasingly vocal criticism. The 1770s and 1780s saw the launching of any number of social crusades mobilized by determined, articulate pamphlet-writers, petitioners and sanctimonious troublemakers. They took aim at particular evils, invariably and significantly described as ‘unnatural’: prison sentences for unmarried mothers (often made pregnant by debauched young and not-so-young gentlemen); the state of the prisons to which they, as well as debtors and common criminals, were sent; the indiscriminate application of the death penalty for trivial felonies. The plight of children – so often at the core of all the heart-tugging causes of the Romantic generation – was guaranteed to inspire pathos and fury from the growing constituency of social virtue, whether they were poor newborn infants given the virtual death sentence of being dispatched to one of the London wet nurses in the slums of St Giles’s or St Clement Danes; African children torn from their families and villages, and herded on to the slave ships; or the ‘climbing boys’ sent up filthy, soot-caked chimneys to contract cancer of the scrotum and respiratory diseases before being got rid of at 12 or 14 as too big to do the job.

  Common to all these crusades was their intense religious fervour. Most of the evangelists who burned to correct the evils of their age believed that the established Church had become too rich, too complacent, too aristocratic, to fulfil its Christian pastoral mission, and was part of the problem rather than an instrument for solving it. In response, the 1770s and 1780s saw the most extraordinary spiritual rebirth in Britain since the 17th century; a great flowering of dissenting faiths and Churches in which the Bible was read (as it had been by the radical sects of Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth) as a proclamation of the doctrine of common humanity, and the gospel of compassion for the poor and downtrodden.

  Not all of those Nonconformist Churches were necessarily radical. After all, true evangelicals, with their emphasis on mystical revelation, required surrender to its power. And John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, detested Unitarians and their rejection of the divinity of Christ, calling it ‘poison’. But the intensity of his tirades was a backhanded compliment to the attraction of what could for the first time be called, without uttering an oxymoron, ‘rational Christianity’. It was, in fact, hard to find a Unitarian preacher in the 1770s and 1780s who was not also a sharp critic of the social and political status quo. For men such as Joseph Priestley (better known to posterity as a scientist, one of the discoverers of oxygen) and the Welsh Dr Richard Price, Jesus was no longer to be thought of as the son of God but as the first of the reformers, an all round good egg and socially concerned citizen who, more than any other, had preached the indissoluble bonds of obligation tying the more fortunate to those less so.

  ‘Am I not a Man and a Brother?’ read the inscription on the famous anti-slavery ceramic medallion produced by Josiah Wedgwood’s factory at Etruria in Staffordshire. And the new Churches of brotherhood under Christ preached their spiritualized civics using every means at their command: hymns; anthems; charismatic meetings at which the spirit of righteousness burst from their lun
gs; series of lectures; pamphlets and petitions to parliament; and, not least, the powerful medium of images, designed by artists who included William Blake and printed on every available surface – drinking goblets as well as paper. Each cause had its own particular story of infamy, repeated over and over as a rallying cry. The scandal of the slave ship Zong, when over 100 sick Africans were thrown overboard so that the master could collect on insurance, was used time and again to mobilize indignation against the so-called triangular trade – cheap manufactured goods from Britain to West Africa, that cargo then exchanged for slaves to the West Indies, in turn replaced by sugar and rum for the third leg back to Britain. The fresh converts thus recruited came from almost every class of society: reform-minded aristocrats as well as preachers, country gentlemen, lawyers, physicians and tradesmen – the same kind of broad church of the righteous, in fact, that had made the revolution of the 1640s. But this time it also conspicuously included men from the world of science and industry; very often they were the second generation of famous names, like Thomas Wedgwood, who felt they had to earn or even atone for their good fortune, and who wanted to distinguish it from money made from the trade in black humans. And among the congregations of the indignant were now counted completely new constituencies: well-read women, both genteel and middle class, and even domestic servants who were said to sit in the back rows of Dr Richard Price’s meeting house on Newington Green in London.

  That parliament needed reform was obvious. The electorate was actually 3 per cent smaller than it had been before the Civil War; there were rotten boroughs, like Old Sarum with an electorate of seven, which still returned a member. ‘Placemen’ bought their seats on the understanding that they would vote with the government; and the newly populous towns were grossly under-represented. But was the unreformed parliament beyond redemption? The first and most intensely felt complaint was the narrowness with which the Act of Toleration enacted in 1689 had been construed. The Dissenters wanted more than just to be allowed to worship; they wanted full civil equality – the abolition of the Test Acts, which denied them access to public office. (The Tory view was that Toleration had only been granted in the first place on condition that that was all that would be given.) But the reformers were forced to concede that there were occasions when ‘Old Corruption’ could be moved to act on their urgent appeals, especially when the issue was moral rather than political. In response to the campaign for climbing boys (which inspired Blake’s poem ‘The Chimney Sweeper’, 1789), an act was passed in 1788 prohibiting the employment of children under the age of eight and sending them up a lit chimney. It also stipulated that they should be washed at least once a week. But the Act was largely unenforced, and for those people who were most concerned about the fate of the poor, it was not nearly enough. Attempts to reform poor relief based on the system adopted by the Berkshire parish of Speenhamland, which, in an effort to keep paupers from the workhouse, linked a wage supplement, funded from the parish rates, to the price of bread, depended entirely on the goodwill of local communities. To the critics, this was just sending the problem back to the consideration of those most likely to ignore it.

  When Thomas Bewick began work as an engraver’s apprentice in Newcastle, he smoked pipes and drank ale with well-read, articulate young men who had no hesitation in sounding off about the wicked indifference of the high and mighty. The most radical of all was the diminutive, pugnacious school-teacher Thomas Spence, whom Bewick described as ‘one of the warmest philanthropists in the world. The happiness of mankind seemed with him to absorb every other consideration. He was of a cheerful disposition, warm in his attachment to his friends, and in his patriotism to his country; but he was violent against people whom he considered of an opposite character.’ In the spirit of the Diggers of the 1650s, Spence had become convinced that all modern ills emanated from the original evil of ownership of land. He declaimed his communism at a debating society (one of thousands formed all around the provinces in this period, including some in London, expressly for women) that held its sessions in Spence’s schoolroom on the Broad Garth. Although he evidently warmed to Spence’s enthusiasm and to his ‘sincere and honest’ concern for the unfortunate, Bewick believed his ideas dangerously Utopian, fit for some ‘uninhabited country’ but shockingly wrong in presuming to ‘take from people what is their own’. On one day the argument got over-heated and the two moved from angry words to cudgels. ‘He did not know that I was a proficient in cudgel playing, and I soon found that he was very defective. After I had blackened the insides of his thighs and arms, he became quite outrageous and acted very unfairly, which obliged me to give him a severe beating.’

  But while property for Bewick remained very definitely sacred, there was much else about the self-satisfaction of the ruling order that angered him. For those meeting and debating the present and several ills of the country at Swarley’s Club in the Black Boy in Newcastle, or listening to the reverends John Horne Tooke, Richard Price or Joseph Priestley denounce ‘Old Corruption’, it was less the facts of the unreformed parliament that stuck in their craw than the fantastic and self-serving mythology by which this state of affairs was defended. Much as the modern fantasy of the well-ordered, benevolent country estate, with all its tenants and labourers toiling and tilling in the land of plenty, hid the ugly realities of rural poverty, so the endless recitation of how very fortunate Britons were to be living in the free-est, most wisely managed, just and prosperous of all states came to grate on the nerves of the manifestly unfortunate and unrepresented.

  The window-dressing of power came in two versions: Tory and Whig. The Tory version categorically laid down as a divinely ordained truism that the ‘people’ had no claim whatsoever to determine the ordering of their government; and that their natural and proper state was obedience and submission to a benevolent monarch, the Church and a parliament elected by those who, through their property and interest, had a right to be included in the electorate. The Whig version was that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 had been all that would ever be needed to secure the ‘ancient constitution’ against the threat of monarchical tyranny, and that the ‘Revolution Settlement’, with its enactment of toleration and its guarantee of parliaments (elected only every seven years), was enough of a shield for the liberties of the free-born Englishman.

  But the centenary of that revolution – approaching in 1788 – was an unavoidable occasion for looking long and hard at both those justifications of the status quo. Such a critical re-examination was made to seem more urgent by the failure of William Pitt the Younger, first in 1782 as a 22-year-old MP and then in 1785 as a 25-year-old prime minister, to secure even a modest measure of parliamentary self-reform; and by Pitt’s active opposition, in 1788–9, to the repeal of the Test Act. Across the Atlantic, Tom Paine’s Common Sense (1775) had already taken an axe to most of the status-quo assumptions by asserting the right, in fact the duty, of the Americans to resist in terms of a defence of natural rights (for the taxed to be represented and free from forced billeting of British soldiers). The American lesson had, of course, not gone unheeded on this side of the Atlantic, especially by those who had always been critics of the war recently fought there. In the 1780s, proselytizing organizations like the Society for the Promotion of Constitutional Information and the Westminster Association, who numbered among their members not just preachers, professionals and artisans but also the radical fringe of the Whigs (the 3rd Duke of Richmond, the 3rd Duke of Grafton and the playwright–politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who met at Holland House, home of their silver-tongued leader, that child of a permissive Rousseau-ite nursery, Charles James Fox), began to flirt with a potentially democratic justification of government, one that began with the right of the people to choose or change their own rulers. That right, moreover, was said to be rooted not just in nature but in history. According to that view all governments had originated with the unforced, voluntary agreement of the people to assign their authority to representatives (be they kings or pa
rliaments) for the express purpose of protecting their freedom and security. This agreement had always been understood as a mutual contract. The people would give their allegiance only so long as the government to which they had provisionally entrusted the protection of their rights respected them. Should those same authorities be judged guilty of violating rather than upholding those natural rights, the sovereign people were at perfect liberty to remove them.

  This was heady stuff: part regurgitation of old ‘Commonwealthmen’ doctrines left over from the radicals of the 17th century; part American republicanism with a dash of Rousseau added for extra force. But it was the essence of what a succession of speakers – James Burgh, Priestley, Price, Horne Tooke, Major John Cartwright – had to say to the discontented of the 1780s. That such opinions were far from being restricted to a tiny minority of agitators out of touch with the mainstream is borne out by the astounding sales of their often indigestibly severe opinions. Richard Price, for example, sold 60,000 copies (the kind of figure surpassed only by Tom Paine) of his daunting Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (1776). The fact that many of these opinions had been aired before, not least by John Milton, was far from being a sign of weakness (as some modern historians have assumed) but actually the secret of its appeal. For the late 18th century was becoming obsessed with the British past, especially the ‘Gothick’ Middle Ages – not just its political history, but its architecture, dress, furniture and armour, all of which saw compendious and beautifully illustrated histories published. So when Alfred the Great, the wise, the strong, the good, was trotted out yet again (by the anti-slavery campaigner Granville Sharp, for example) as the paragon of a popular monarch who worked in benevolent mutual collaboration with that mother of all parliaments, the Anglo-Saxon Witenagemot, history was taken not as some obscure and arcane irrelevance but as the model of what truly native British government was supposed to look like. The sealing of Magna Carta, another mythical moment when ‘the people’ had, through their barons and burgesses, exercised their right to call a despot to account, was also celebrated as an episode pregnant with significance for the present and future. It was just at this time, moreover, that the militant vegetarian–antiquarian–tramper Joseph Ritson’s researches into Robin Hood were recasting that legendary character as a romantic popular hero (with wood engravings by Thomas Bewick).