A History of Britain, Volume 3

by Simon Schama

  Later that week the great man actually came to visit Hazlitt’s father on Church business. William, as usual, sat staring at the floor, tongue-tied except when blurting out speeches on some topic on which he happened to feel passionately and supposed (not wrongly) that Coleridge felt the same – Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin. On the table was a haunch of Welsh mutton and a dish of turnips. Flooded with happiness at talking to, and being talked at by, Coleridge, Hazlitt savoured each mouthful as if he had never tasted food before. Then, in a daze of veneration, after being invited to Nether Stowey in the spring, he followed the poet six miles down the road (passing the Romantic qualification of having good walking legs).

  In Somerset, Hazlitt was taken to Wordsworth’s manor house and met Dorothy; slept in a blue-hung bed there opposite portraits of George I and George II, and saw William return from Bristol and ‘make havoc’ with half a Cheshire cheese. He got to take morning walks with the poets and listened to them recite drafts of their verses with, he said (tantalizingly), ‘a decided chaunt’; Coleridge was always more theatrical, Wordsworth more quietly lyrical. On one of those walks, just before Coleridge left for Germany to study philosophy and go wandering in the Harz mountains, they took another long saunter along the path above the seashore, then ‘loitered on the “ribbed sea-sands’” and examined odd species of seaweed; it was there, finally, that Hazlitt thought he understood what they meant by living naturally. A fisherman told them there had been a drowning the day before and that he and his mates had tried to save the boy at the risk of their own lives. ‘He said,’ wrote Hazlitt later, ‘he did not know how it was that they ventured, but, “Sir, we have a nature towards one another.”’

  ‘One another!’ This was ‘social affection’ in action, and what Hazlitt thought he saw in the poets’ shared households in Somerset was an unforced community based on mutual sympathy: unaffected family life; easy conversation with the people of the villages; the rediscovery of unspoiled humanity far from the fads and frenzies of metropolitan fashion.

  When, in 1802, Hazlitt wanted to see the poets again he had to go north, for both of them had resettled in the Lake District: Wordsworth was living with his sister and brother John in a little cottage at Grasmere, and Coleridge in the much grander Greta Hall nearby. But something had cooled along with the climate of their countryside. Nature now seemed, not to connect them with the daily world beyond their immediate company, but rather to detach them from it. The words ‘solitude’ and ‘solitary’ started recurring, especially in Wordsworth’s poems; and when he introduced figures, hewn almost from the rocky landscape, they were seen as desolate apparitions silhouetted against the bare hills. To Hazlitt, the only serious connection of ‘the gang’ seemed to be with each other. Grasmere had become a little commune of family and friends, reading to each other, taking possession of the countryside by carving their names into rocks and trees; sharing meals. If they still thought of themselves as poet–philosophers, what they preached, Hazlitt found, was not any sort of public reformation (much less revolution) but rather the recasting of individual lives by re-establishing the simplicity and intensity of the connection to nature experienced in childhood. Coleridge’s idea of a great change was to turn the Lake District yellow by surreptitiously sowing laburnum seeds in the woods.

  This intense self-absorption irked Hazlitt, now 25 and a struggling artist who kept himself alive by hack journalism. He knew perfectly well that, for all the ostentatious simplicity of their lives in the Lakes, the poets could not have afforded it without the help of gentleman patrons like Sir George Beaumont. So when Coleridge ruled out Hazlitt as a travelling companion for his friend Tom Wedgwood (the ex-British Club member from Paris), describing him as intellectually brilliant but personally ‘99 in 100 singularly repulsive – : brow-hanging, shoe-contemplative, strange … he is jealous, gloomy, and of an irritable Pride – addicted to women’, and when Wedgwood maliciously repeated this to the horrified and hurt Hazlitt, the disenchantment was total. He was the essayist, after all, who would write the definitive piece on ‘The Pleasures of Hating’, and in the years ahead he seldom missed an opportunity to sink his sharp little teeth into Coleridge’s ailing, opium-addled reputation. It was personal but it was also political. Hazlitt never forgave Wordsworth or Coleridge their apostasy; the indecent eagerness with which they echoed Edmund Burke when he made Nature not a revolutionary, but a patriot.

  In 1802 the signing of the Peace of Amiens briefly opened the sea lanes to safe passage in and out of France. Tom Paine, who had never really recovered from the typhus he had contracted in jail, but who was suffering even more from a clinical aversion to Napoleon (‘the very butcher of Liberty and the greatest monster that Nature ever spewed’) had finally given up on France as the haven of freedom and social justice. He sailed from Le Havre to the United States where, after predictably quarrelling with George Washington and John Adams, the country’s first two presidents, he moved to the 300-acre farm in New Rochelle, New York, presented to him by the grateful state in 1784. He lived there almost until the end of his days, amidst a few hogs and cows. Pilgrims who came to visit him (and there were many) were disconcerted by his return to a state of nature, so relentlessly frugal that he dried out his used tea leaves after a pot to recycle them for further use. Poverty finally forced him to sell the farm, and he died in New York City in 1809, near penniless.

  Not everyone shared his horror of the state of despotism that France had become. William Hazlitt, for example, had become enthralled by the Napoleonic epic and would, in fact, never free himself of it, later writing a biography that is perhaps the dullest of all his works. In 1802 he somehow scraped up enough money to go to Paris, where he stood in the Louvre, agog at the masterpieces, while conveniently overlooking the fact that the First Consul had accumulated the contents of the museum by plundering the churches and galleries of Europe. In the Salon Carré he saw Charles James Fox – touring Europe during the brief period of peace – now grown fat and grey but still Hazlitt’s indomitable hero for refusing to truckle to Pitt’s wartime security state.

  And much as he despised Bonapartist France, Wordsworth too made the summer packet boat crossing along with his sister Dorothy. He had no intention of recapturing his youthful passions, but rather proposed to put a seal on them. He had decided to marry and, before he could do so with an easy conscience, needed to set eyes once more on Annette and his daughter, Caroline; perhaps assure himself that they would not stand in his way. For her part Annette had practical reasons for seeing her old lover. She needed to be certain that, once he was married, he would continue to pay the modest maintenance he had been sending for Caroline’s upbringing. And since, in Napoleon’s misogynist state, mothers of illegitimate children had no rights over their offspring, she also needed to feel certain that Wordsworth would not try to take their child from her. The reassurances were duly given. The poet, who found he could not give much else, bestowed on mother and child a volume of his verses. They went their separate ways.

  Both Coleridge and Wordsworth were now fast turning into all-out propagandists for John Bull. When the truce with France broke down in May 1803, and an invasion seemed even more likely than in 1798, Coleridge wrote in back-to-the-wall proto-Churchillian mode, revelling in insularity, in the concept of Britain as the last refuge against European tyranny: ‘Englishmen must think of themselves and act for themselves … let France bribe or puzzle all Europe into a confederation against us. I will not fear for my country … the words of Isaiah will be truly prophetic. “They trod the winepress alone and of the nations there was none with them.”’

  In these Boneyphobic years it was Coleridge, not Hazlitt, who was in tune with the vast majority of Britons. The threat was not, after all, imaginary. In 1803–4 there were at least 100,000 French and allied troops camped at Boulogne, and 2300 vessels (most of them, admittedly, small) waiting for the order to sail. When Napoleon put the Bayeux Tapestry on display for the first time the point was not lost, ne
ither on the massed ranks of the army of England nor on the defenders 20 miles across the narrow straits. By the end of 1804, Britain was also at war with Spain.

  William Pitt, however, had not survived 10 years of brutal, global war only to go down with an arrow in his eye. Recognizing the scale of what he was up against on his return to office in May 1804, he and the new First Lord of the Admiralty, Henry Dundas, mobilized national resources on a scale and with a thoroughness not seen even in his father’s heyday as a war leader 50 years before. More impressively, they did it for the most part without coercion, unlike the Prussians or the Russians. (Although more than once impressment officers, tipped off that he was lecturing, had tried to seize the irrepressible Thelwall, who took to carrying a loaded pistol and on one occasion pressed it to the temples of the assailant who tried to take him.) While the loyalism of the early years of the war had been exhibited mostly by the gentry and patriot middle classes, who delivered men-at-arms to the government reserve, the extraordinary numbers who volunteered to fight against the Napoleonic threat of invasion did so in a much more spontaneous manner. It is a phenomenon that recent histories call, without anachronism, ‘national defence patriotism’. Sometimes the authorities’ worst problem was avoiding the chaos of being inundated with manpower, virtually all of it untrained and much of it undisciplined. A Defence of the Realm Act ordered lists to be compiled of every able-bodied male between 17 and 55, so that a home guard could be formed and called on in the event of an invasion. In 1804, at the height of the scare, more than 400,000 came forward – around half of those asked. Many of the keenest came not, as the government had predicted, from the countryside but from the southern ports (most immediately in the front line) and the industrial towns of the Midlands and the north which, just a decade earlier, had been written off as hotbeds of disloyalty and sedition. By late 1804, the country had been transformed into ‘Fortress Britannia’. Out of a population of 15 million, 3¾ million men were of an age to bear arms. And over 800,000 – one in five – were in fact part of the national defence; 386,000 as volunteers, of whom 266,000 were in the army and 120,000 in the navy.

  The Scottish contribution to this massive mobilization was huge. Highland contingents – to the satisfaction of Dundas, a Lowlander Scot, who, since he had a holiday house on Loch Earn, rather fancied himself an honorary Highlander – were conspicuous. It was, after all, an alternative to emigration, and during this war the Black Watch, the Gordon Highlanders and the Cameron Highlanders all achieved mythic status. Much was made of the fact that the first blessed martyrs of the land war – Sir Ralph Abercromby, killed in Egypt in 1801, and Sir John Moore, killed in Spain in 1809 – were Scots. Although Scottish soldiers had served in America and India, it was in this war, above all, that Scotland’s sense of itself was enhanced, rather than diminished, by being British.

  The king, of course, was the symbolic focus of all this genuine patriotic feeling. When George III reviewed 27,000 volunteers in Hyde Park in October 1803 a crowd of a half a million watched the spectacular parade. Bad memories of the mobbed coach in October 1795 must have seemed a very long way away. He was able, now, to enjoy public appearances again and between 1797 and 1800 even attended 55 theatre performances to drink in the applause of the audience. It was in these years and for this king that ‘God Save the King’ (rather than ‘God Save the Rights of Man’) became, definitively, the national anthem. Burke’s loyalism, defined by him as a popular sentiment, appeared, at this moment anyway, to have been vindicated; the territorial imperative of defending hearth and home established as the most natural instinct of all.

  It was exactly at this moment that the mythology of Merrie England, of the sceptred isle, was born, complete with especially passionate revivals of the appropriate Shakespeare histories. Anything historical found an enthusiastic following, a market, as now, perhaps for the first time, the past became a pastime, but a serious pastime – a way to discover Britishness. The romance of Britain had begun as radical geography and had come of age as patriotic history. Books for children sprouted illustrations and scenes that told little Johnny and Jane Bulls their island story. King John at Runnymede, Queen Elizabeth at Tilbury, Bonnie Prince Charlie at Glenfinnan, all sprang off the page. They reappeared in Madame Tussaud’s new waxwork museum, and in popular paintings by illustrator–artists like Thomas Stothard. Meeting the craving to make contact with the ancestors, books on historical costume, furniture, sports, weapons and armour all appeared. And after the great authority on medieval arms and armour, Samuel Rush Meyrick, was invited by George IV to reorganize the collection at Windsor Castle so that phantom knights could be stood beneath the big histories painted by Benjamin West, an entire generation of country gentlemen went to their barns and attics to clean the rust off ancient swords and helms and reassembled them in their newly Gothicized ‘Great Hall’.

  As well as the chronicle of their own war, history had become patriotic entertainment. And the biggest boon to the business was its most fantastic showman, Horatio Nelson. He may have been not much over 5 feet tall, with only one arm, blind in one eye, prematurely grey hair and no teeth, but in every way that counted Nelson was larger than life. As a naval commander he was a genius, and no one was more convinced of that than Nelson himself. He came along at precisely the moment when the Romantic cult of genius was itself being born. Conventionally, the pantheon of God-kissed talent was reserved for the great artists – Shakespeare, Milton, Michelangelo. But Nelson’s astounding career and his own equally prodigious talent for self-promotion made it possible for a military man to be treated this way too. From the start, the impresarios of patriotic entertainment made him their star. The victory at the battle of the Nile in 1798 had, after all, everything calculated to pull in the crowds – Mameluke warriors, camels, crocodiles and the French going down en masse to Davy Jones’s locker. Henry Aston Barker set box-office records with his 360-degree panoramic ‘Battle of the Nile’. But for William Turner, ex-coachmaker and painter, even huge pictures in the round didn’t do justice to the epic. Off Fleet Street Turner built a water theatre called ‘the Naumachia, after the Roman flooded arenas. Queues formed round the block to get into Turner’s l½-hour Nelson spectacular, complete with ear-splitting cannon and smoke machines. (The other Turner would inspect what was left of the Victory, along with his fellow artist Philippe de Loutherbourg, whose unerring instinct for public taste had taken him from Derbyshire wonders to naval battle pieces, so that he could achieve in 1808 his astonishing coup de théâtre, The Battle of Trafalgar, as Seen from the Mizen Starboard Shrouds of the Victory.)

  But it was hard to upstage the little man himself. Everything about him, even (or especially) his passion for Emma Hamilton, was a gift to the cult of celebrity. Although Pitt and the king and the stuffed shirts at the Admiralty cringed at his refusal to disguise his relationship with the much-painted woman who was, after all, the wife of the British ambassador to Naples, Nelson’s reputation for naughtiness did nothing to harm his popularity; quite possibly the reverse. He was already the glamorous, charismatic outsider, and all his well-known vices of vanity, recklessness and arrogance were sold, not least by him, as part and parcel of the heroic bravura. Nelson played on his cult like a harp. He dressed to kill and be killed, jangling with decorations, whether on parade or the poopdeck, so it was no surprise when all that glittering hardware did, in fact, make him the perfect target for the French mizenmast sharpshooters, one of whom hit his target at the battle of Trafalgar on 21 October 1805. Nelson had known that the battle would be decisive for the preservation, not just of British maritime dominance, but the very independence of the island. Had Napoleon been able to unite the French and Spanish fleets in a single armada, he might well have been able to launch an invasion. The Grande Armée was still camped on the Channel coast. So his heroic death guaranteed life to Great Britain.

  Like James Wolfe a generation before, Nelson virtually designed his own apotheosis – his translation to the immortals. The huge ceremo
ny in January 1806 completely overshadowed William Pitt’s funeral the following month and, for that matter, was on a scale that outdid royal ceremony. Like Winston Churchill’s funeral a century and a half later, everything was finely designed to tap into deep patriotic emotion. The body, preserved in alcohol, was unloaded from the shattered hulk of the Victory at Greenwich, then borne to a lying-in-state, where the hero’s coffin could be viewed by ordinary sailors and the people whose love he had cultivated and genuinely cared for. Black barges carried the bier downstream, like Arthur to Avalon, to a four-hour service at St Paul’s Cathedral, where royals were allowed by their own anachronistic protocol to attend only in their capacity as private individuals. But unlike Churchill, this was where Nelson stayed in the black marble sarcophagus originally meant for Cardinal Wolsey, buried right beneath the centre of the dome.

  Politically, as his enthusiastically vindictive role in propping up the autocratic Bourbons of Naples made clear (a commitment backed up by torture of political prisoners and a carnival of hangings, all under Nelson’s direction), the vice-admiral was a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary. But he still belonged to the streets and the taverns, to the ordinary seamen and dockers, and had got their blood up and pulse racing in a way none of the epauletted grand dukes could ever manage.