A History of Britain, Volume 3

by Simon Schama

  A deteriorating military situation in Europe and a consciousness of their limited resources in Ireland meant that Dublin Castle could not afford to dispense with the help of Protestant militia – like the Orange Order, founded in 1795 – to counter Defenderism, and thus instantly aggravated the situation. By the beginning of 1798, then, the tragic spectacle of modern Irish history was already on view: rival, armed sectarian irregulars committing mutual atrocities against the backdrop of an embattled Britain fighting to close its own back door against invasion.

  While the French army was encamped on the Normandy coast, Irish agents had been sent to England and Scotland to sound out the possibility of a domestic uprising in the event of an invasion. They returned deeply pessimistic, but much more optimistic about a rebellion in Ireland itself. For months, the familiar game of ‘after you’ was played out, reminiscent of the disastrous strategy used by the Scottish Jacobites during the first half of the century: the French waited for signs of insurrection, while the United Irishmen waited for news of a French expedition. Finally, in the spring of 1798, the Irish acted first, attacking Dublin Castle and bringing out much of the southeast in revolt. However, Ulster in the north, the key to success, remained ominously quiet. The customary atrocities were committed by both sides and at Vinegar Hill on 21 June the Irish were brutally routed by British troops, giving the new viceroy, the now aged but still vigorous Cornwallis, his last, bloodiest success in a career devoted to cleaning up the messes made by the British Empire.

  French help did come, but it was too late and landed at Killala on the shore of County Mayo in the west, as far away as it was possible to be from the decisive southeastern theatre of conflict in Leinster and Munster. But the western province of Connacht was poor, angry and overwhelmingly Catholic. It had strong Defender support in the villages and country towns and an impromptu army, led by schoolteachers, farmers and priests, and armed with pitchforks and pikes. Connacht rallied to the French. Before the British and the yeomanry could regroup the insurgents had some success, at Castlebar; but before long their supplies of men and munitions dwindled and capitulation was inevitable. To cap the disaster, a small fleet with Tone on board, which had barely made it past the British blockade at Brest, was caught off the coast of Donegal. Tried and found guilty of treason, Tone committed suicide in prison before he could be hanged.

  A bald summary of the military ebb and flow of the events of what became known as ‘the year of the French’ does not, however, properly record the magnitude of the misery of 1798. At least 30,000 Irish were slaughtered; an economically and politically dynamic world turned into a charnel house of invasion, repression and sectarian massacres – although, once the immediate military threat had passed, the government sensibly commuted many of the sentences passed on rebels. More decisively, hopes of Irish freedom were replaced by the fact, in 1801, of Irish absorption into Britain: the completion of the last cross on the Union Jack. The parliament at Dublin (retrospectively considered the root of the problem) was abolished and Irish members would now sit at Westminster. But this move was anything but a quid pro quo. The number of Irish boroughs, and so the number of representatives in parliament, was steeply reduced and the Irish debt (unlike the Scottish equivalent a century earlier) remained separate – and a serious taxable burden on the people of Ireland. Henry Grattan, who had lived through all this, was only telling the truth when he declared that the union was ‘not an identification of people, as it excludes the Catholic from the parliament and the state … it is … not an identification of the two nations; it is merely a merger of the parliament of the one nation in that of the other; one nation, namely England, retains her full proportion; Ireland strikes off two thirds … by that act of absorption the feeling of one nation is not identified but alienated.’

  But 1798 was not just ‘the year of the French’; it was the year of the British too. For when the French landed in Ireland, some of those who had believed most fiercely in the imminent brotherhood of man decided, philosophically, to come home. A large number of the ‘Friends of Peace’ had argued that ‘Pitt’s war’ was a thinly disguised instrument of oppression, giving pretexts for attacking free speech and closing down the avenues of protest while making the monied richer and the labouring people poorer. (Joseph Johnson probably still felt that way when he and J. S. Jordan, Paine’s publisher, were indicted for publishing attacks on the loyalist Bishop of Llandaff.) Many, however, were coming to have almost as dim a view of Bonaparte and the France of the Directory, which seemed, to those who had been there and those who had heard, just as much a tyranny imposed by the propertied classes. Perhaps, too, with a powerful ‘Army of England’ arrayed across the Channel, they were beginning to concede the power of Burke’s axiom in the Reflections that there was something unnatural about cosmopolitanism; that the impartial distribution of affection only testified to the shallowness of those sentiments. Nature, he had said, was particular, local. ‘To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle, the germ, as it were, of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to mankind.’ In other words, there was no humanitarianism except through patriotism.

  At any rate, this was certainly the emotion budding in the warm breast and mighty brain of the 26-year-old Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In the spring of 1798 a quarto edition of three of his long(ish) poems announced, simultaneously, his disillusionment with France and his concern about the fate of Britain. The fact that the publisher of the poems was Joseph Johnson is itself eloquent about the shifting direction of the apostles of nature. Like so many of his generation Coleridge had fervently believed – at Cambridge University and afterwards – that the cause of the French Revolution, the cause of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, opened a new age in which mankind would live according to the rules of nature. The first of the poems, ‘Fears in Solitude’, written during the height of the invasion panic – before Napoleon took his expedition off to Egypt instead, to attack Britain’s Indian empire from the rear – is an extraordinary work of conflicted anguish and ecstasy. Coleridge grieves for the normalization of the continuing war:

  We send our mandates for the certain death

  Of thousands and ten thousands! Boys and girls,

  And women, that would groan to see a child

  Pull off an insect’s leg, all read of war,

  The best amusement for our morning meal!

  But he has also come to accept that, given the nature of the enemy, there may be no alternative and his verses swell into a patriotic threnody:

  O native Britain! O my Mother Isle!

  How shouldst thou prove aught else but dear and holy

  To me, who from thy lakes and mountain-hills,

  Thy clouds, thy quiet dales, thy rocks and seas,

  Have drunk in all my intellectual life,

  All sweet sensations, all ennobling thoughts …

  … O divine

  And beauteous island! thou hast been my sole

  And most magnificent temple …

  The embrace of homeland is followed by the repudiation of the hypocrite aggressor. The second stanza of ‘France: An Ode’ recalls in sorrow the euphoria of 1789:

  When France in wrath her giant-limbs upreared,

  And with that oath which smote air, earth, and sea,

  Stamped her strong foot and said she would be free,

  Bear witness for me, how I hoped and feared!

  At school at Christ’s Hospital the 16-year-old Coleridge had indeed written an ode celebrating the fall of the Bastille, and it was to be 10 years before any sort of recantation crept in. At Jesus College, Cambridge, he had continued to be a notorious trouble-maker, one of the rowdiest supporters of the Unitarian Reverend William Frend when the university brought proceedings to remove him from his fellowship for his attacks on the Church and his ‘seditious’ opinions. Although his prodigal ways had driven Coleridge to enlist briefly (and under a
n assumed name) as a trooper in the 15th Dragoons, his political and social idealism (as much as a cripplingly embarrassing case of saddle sores) got him out of uniform again, certified by the discharging officer as ‘insane’. (Coleridge was always a superb actor.) En route to the mandatory summer walking tour for democrats, where he followed the Pennant tour of the Brito-Celtic sublime, at Oxford Coleridge met the equally ardent young student, Richard Southey. Together the two idealists planned to establish in America a social Utopia, a ‘Pantisocracy’, in which (to the delight, perhaps, of Mary Wollstonecraft if she could but have known it) men would do the house cleaning. The nearest Coleridge got to the banks of the Susquehanna river, though, was Bristol, where for 10 months in 1795–6, during which he met William Wordsworth, he gave public lectures and edited his paper, The Watchman. Throughout this period Coleridge remained a coruscating critic of Pitt and his government, referring to the prime minister as ‘the fiend’ and to his speeches as ‘Mystery concealing Meanness as clouds envelope a dunghill’. He attended a dinner in honour of Charles James Fox, went to see the trials of Horne Tooke and Thelwall, and became a friend of the latter, the ‘Peripatetic’, even while scowling at his atheism. Above all, the ex-trooper’s lectures and articles were full of hatred for the war itself, as a misery inflicted by the rich and powerful on the poor and helpless who paid for it with their taxes and their blood.

  In 1798 Coleridge’s tune changed dramatically. The Watchman had, predictably, folded, leading its editor to comment that ‘I have snapped my squeaking baby-trumpet of sedition and have hung up its fragments in the chamber of Penitences.’ The extinguishing by the French of the independent Confederation of Swiss Cantons had made it unmistakably clear that the threat was not from a liberator but from a common-or-garden military aggressor. Switzerland, moreover, was not just another anachronism to be knocked over. To the Romantics who, like Wordsworth in 1790, had hiked all the way there (after celebrating Bastille Day in France) it was the temple of liberty and the place, par excellence, where the fortress of nature had preserved a people in simplicity, innocence and freedom. Rousseau himself had been born in the shadow of Mont Blanc; William Tell had been reinvented (along with Robin Hood in Britain) as one of the classic heroes of defiance against tyranny; the oath sworn on the Rütli meadow, binding the cantons against their Austrian overlords, had been immortalized by Henry Fuseli. To violate its sanctity, as the French had done, was to unmask themselves as squalid oppressors, all the more detestable for mantling themselves still in the tricolour and pontificating hypocritically about the Rights of Man. Appalled at the betrayal, Coleridge let fly his curse:

  O France, that mockest Heaven, adulterous, blind,

  And patriot only in pernicious toils!

  Are these thy boasts, Champion of human kind?

  … To insult the shrine of Liberty with spoils

  From freemen torn; to tempt and to betray?

  Disillusionment with France did not make Coleridge a reactionary. His dilemma now was how to sustain his ‘social affection’ for the downtrodden beyond the posturing and polemics, the sound and the fury, that had turned ordinary people into cannon fodder. The answer came to him in the third of the three poems in the Johnson-published quarto, ‘Frost at Midnight’, where he looks at his infant son and imagines him far and free from city din:

  But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze

  By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags

  Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds.

  Nature would be both consolation and instruction, but its head tutor now would be not Rousseau but God. Looked at with the honesty and seriousness it deserved, nature did have the power to transform each and every life – but not in the sense of drafting a political agenda. Constitutions and revolutions now seemed absurdly beside the point compared with the illumination to be had from the embrace of the natural and the simple. A vote would never make one happy. A snowdrop in February, the arc of a lark’s flight, the babble of a crawling babe just might.

  Needless to say, these insights did not come to Coleridge in the bustling commercial port of Bristol. He had taken a cottage at Nether Stowey in north Somerset where, on a previous trip, he had met someone whom he thought of as the epitome of the honest, natural man, the tanner and enthusiastic democrat Thomas Poole. Poole had found Coleridge the house, but, more important, it put him within walking distance (given that Coleridge thought nothing of walking 40 miles) of Wordsworth, who was living with his sister Dorothy at Racedown in Dorset. In the years since his return from France, Wordsworth, encouraged by his sister, had also moved away from the shallow apostrophizing of ‘mankind’ and towards an active sympathy with the plight of particular individuals, often the outcasts of society: crippled veterans, itinerant beggars, ragged waifs and orphans, destitute labourers. In 1795 Dorothy described the ‘peasants’ of the southwest as ‘miserably poor; their cottages are shapeless structures (I may almost say) of wood and clay; indeed they are not at all beyond what might be expected in savage life’. During the second half of 1797 and the spring of 1798, after Wordsworth had moved closer to Coleridge, taking a rather grander house at Alfoxden, the two planned something unprecedented. They proposed to compile a collaborative anthology of their work, which would use the plain speech of the labourers and cottagers of the West Country people, and be utterly free of the ornamental fantasies of the pastoral tradition. The ‘Lyrical Ballads’ would not be pretty. They would look at the broken bodies and ruined hovels with a clear eye and an open heart. Often they would sound impolite, and their meter might tread as heavily as a hob-nailed boot on a parlour floor. But to be true to the sovereign force of nature meant, above all, not treating it as a bookish idea, much less a political slogan; it meant living with it as a physical reality. That would be their revolution.

  Some of their greatest and certainly their most intensely compassionate work resulted from this collaboration. Following the plodding round of ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ from house to house, Wordsworth adopted precisely that body of men whom the powerful had judged most expendable of all.

  But deem not this man useless – Statesman! ye

  Who are so restless in your wisdom, ye

  Who have a broom still ready in your hands

  To rid the world of nuisances …

  Why? Because the beggar, through his visits, knitted together in a common act of sympathy a mere aggregate of men and women and fashioned them into a true community, a village. And he also brings together the past with the present:

  While from door to door,

  This old man creeps, the villagers in him

  Behold a record which together binds

  Past deeds and offices of charity

  Else unremembered …

  … Among the farms and solitary huts,

  Hamlets and thinly-scattered villages,

  Where’er the aged Beggar takes his rounds,

  The mild necessity of use compels

  To acts of love …

  Although he may not have owned up to it yet, Wordsworth’s growing preference for individual acts of charity over collective acts of policy; his budding Christian sense of the importance of individual, face-to-face encounters, often deep in the country; and his dawning realization of the unforced strength of tradition, all put him much closer to Burke than Paine. But to some of the locals, who were bemused by the poets hobnobbing with their inferiors (especially since Coleridge decided to express his social sympathy by wearing the clothes of the Somerset country people), these eccentricities started to seem dangerously peculiar. It was rumoured that the gentlemen spoke French. Perhaps some sort of plot was being hatched in the Quantocks in the year of national peril? The appearance of John Thelwall, who – naturally – had walked the 150 miles from London, only confirmed their suspicions. After his acquittal for treason, undeterred by the spies who stuck to him like leeches, Thelwall had become the star lecturer on the provincial radical circuit, in 1796 alone giving 22 lectures in p
laces as far apart as Derby and Norwich. When it became obvious that Thelwall was the reason that the Quantocks poets were attracting talk he decided to move on, taking the spies with him. He believed that, despite fierce arguments with Wordsworth and Coleridge over atheism, he and they were essentially of a like mind; it was a view, alas, not reciprocated.

  Among the pilgrims who came to Nether Stowey and Alfoxden, none was more awe-struck than the 19-year-old William Hazlitt. To Wordsworth and Coleridge, Hazlitt – painfully shy and slightly peculiar – was a puppyish oddity, an amusement. Nothing in his manner suggested that this gauche, pop-eyed aspiring painter and son of an Irish Unitarian minister in Shropshire would become the greatest essayist in the English language. Hazlitt, who in January 1798 had walked 10 miles in the frozen mire to Shrewsbury to hear Coleridge deliver one of his stupendous Unitarian sermons, was by his own overwrought account ‘dumb, inarticulate, helpless, like a worm by the wayside, crushed, bleeding, lifeless’. From the minute Coleridge opened his mouth, his voice rising ‘like a steam of rich distilled perfumes’, Hazlitt was a goner; the big man with the long, dark, flopping hair and full lips put him in mind of St John crying in the wilderness, ‘whose food was locusts and wild honey’.