by Simon Schama
Around 1803–4, when the country was going through its patriotic paroxysm, Cobbett went through an almost Pauline moment of conversion. His Damascus road was a village called Horton Heath. It was one of the few still to have an unenclosed common, and he noted that the villagers used the green to accommodate, cooperatively, 100 beehives, 60 pigs, 15 cows and 800 poultry. Notwithstanding Arthur Young’s truisms that such commons were an uneconomic waste, Cobbett believed that, on the contrary, they served the village economy very well indeed. Then he began to make some calculations in earnest. A report published in 1803 admitted that there were around 1 million paupers in England and Wales; the vast majority, of course, in the countryside. One in seven in Wiltshire was a pauper, receiving Poor-Law relief; one in four in Sussex. Cobbett relayed this horrifying news to his readers in his new, furious voice: ‘Yes in England! English men, women and children. More than a million of them; one eighth part of our whole population!’ Oliver Goldsmith, written off as a hopeless sentimentalist, had been right!
What was more, Cobbett felt deeply that, while the platitude was to crow about how rich Britain was, the condition of the common people of rural Britain must have been getting progressively worse over the past half-century. Misery, on this scale he thought, was modern! He blamed the nouveaux riches; the capitalists; the money men who had bewitched the traditional squires and landlords from their old roast beef and plum pudding paternalism and let their labourers fend for themselves on the market. They were the ‘bullfrogs’ who gobbled down at a gulp the small tenants. ‘Since the pianofortes and the parlour bells and the carpets came into the farmhouse, the lot of the labourers has been growing worse and worse.’
Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, in which these evils were enumerated, was an extraordinary, almost revolutionary, broadsheet. It used not just aggressively earthy language but the kind of village-pump and alehouse talk calculated to be read out loud. And its main feature, as Hazlitt justly observed, was William Cobbett: ‘I asked how he got on. He said very badly. I asked him what was the cause of it. He said hard times. “What times,” said he, “was there ever a finer summer, a finer harvest …? Ah,” said he, “they make it bad for poor people for all that.”’ Throughout his long journalistic career, Cobbett also remained an active farmer and benevolent landlord, housing bachelor labourers in one of his own houses, paying his adult male farm workers on average 15 shillings a week or what he claimed was 20 times the going market rate – and still making a profit.
Living as close to the people as he did, Cobbett took violent exception to the kind of language used to characterize ordinary people – ‘the peasantry’ or Burke’s ‘swinish multitude’. Cobbett felt that such an epithet actually maligned hogs, with whom he warmly identified (‘when I make my hog’s lodging place for winter I look well at it and consider whether, in a pinch I could … make shift to lodge in it myself’). The problem with the conditions endured by labourers he saw at Cricklade in Gloucestershire was that their dwellings fell below pigsty standards ‘and their food not nearly equal to that of pigs’.
Since parliament seemed deaf to this misery, Cobbett signed on for the usual radical platform: the purge of ‘Old Corruption’; the sweeping away of placemen and sinecures and rotten boroughs; but also and always, social justice for the poor. His aim, as he saw it, was not to accelerate social disintegration but its opposite: the rebuilding of the ties of social sympathy that he thought had once – not so very long ago – connected farmers with smallholders and labourers. It was his genius to bring the distress of the country and town together. He knew, of course, that they could and would understand each other, if for no other reason than that the industrial towns of Lancashire, Yorkshire and the Midlands were crammed with first-generation migrants from Arthur Young’s capital-intensive, labour-extensive, commercialized countryside. Both were now suffering. Weavers and knitters had no work; hedgers, farm-hands, ditch-diggers and shepherds were now hired for shorter periods and in the winter sometimes not at all.
Not surprisingly, Cobbett’s landscape does not look anything like Wordsworth’s idyll of God-sheltered Lakeland. It is, instead, usually filthy, diseased, on the edge of starvation, at its worst reminiscent of shocked evangelical reports of destitution and poverty in India, with squatters and beggars huddled by the road. And he saw that in what were sometimes assumed (wrongly) to be the poorer regions – the north and northwest – the labourers were actually better off. In the great engine of agrarian prosperity, on the other hand – the grain belt of the Home Counties and East Anglia, where land had been most heavily exploited to maximize profit – the condition of the labourers was worst; he predicted, accurately, that it would be there, if anywhere, that a new peasants’ revolt would catch fire.
The red-faced, loud-mouthed, piggy Cobbett rode and rode through the counties, poking into barnyards and poorhouses, picking on the bailiffs and absentee landlords who had the most infamous records, and reporting everything in his newspaper. Despite its editor being harassed by the government, who were understandably livid at his betrayal, as they saw it, and despite his doing time in Newgate for an article (not actually published) attacking flogging in the army, Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register sold, at its height in 1817, 60,000 copies a week, overwhelmingly more than any other publication. He was certainly no saint. A vicious anti-semite, he also hated blacks and, until he saw that abolitionism was popular in his working-class constituency, insisted that the ‘greasy Negro’ in the Caribbean had a far better time of it than the British working class. But there is no doubt that no one since Tom Paine had quite got to the ordinary people of Britain in the way that Cobbett did and turned them into political animals.
There is also no doubt, however, that the new crusade for the restoration of ‘natural rights’ and old liberties was sent on its way by another surge of religious enthusiasm amongst the middle-class and working people of the country. Some of it was fuelled by disgust at well-publicized scandals in the heart of the ruling order.
When the notorious ‘Impure’ Harriette Wilson published her instantly best-selling memoirs in 1825, it emerged that her long list of aristocratic clients included the Duke of Wellington (who shared her with the Duke of Argyll) and the Marquis of Worcester. His amusement was to dress her up in a replica of his uniform as an officer of the 10th Hussars and accompany her out riding in that get-up (the only way, she claimed, to get him out of bed). Along with the predictable strain of moral outrage at the shamelessness of the new Sodom, there was also a distinct tinge of millenarian urgency. A great change was coming, and the regiments of the righteous would be its advance guard. The Unitarian meeting house and the evangelical chapel and schoolroom were often the places where petitions were drafted and marches and assemblies organized. Their demands included both political and moral reform: an end to the monopoly of the Church of England and to slavery, as well as to the worm-eaten parliament. On the fringe of this mass enthusiasm, and hoping to tap its anger, were men who were genuine revolutionaries, like Bewick’s old print-shop sparring partner the millenarian communist Thomas Spence. Slightly less extreme were journalists like Thomas Jonathan Wooler, the editor of The Black Dwarf, always in and out of prison for inciting the overthrow of the government. Spies were once again sent to infiltrate the most dangerous cells but this time as agents provocateurs, engineering conspiracies that would allow the authorities to make arrests and break the organization.
In November 1817, two deaths occurred which seemed to symbolize the polarization of the country. The only genuinely popular member of the royal family other than the king, Princess Charlotte Augusta, the beautiful and apparently liberal-minded daughter of the Prince Regent, died and the country fell into a paroxysm of grief, uncannily anticipating the mourning for a 20th-century princess to whom the same qualities would be attributed. Augusta was said to be the princess who understood the lives of ordinary people; who, given the age and decrepitude of her father and uncles, might well be in the line of success
ion and who, at any rate, might have produced an entire dynasty of compassionate, intelligent monarchs. At almost the same time, three radicals who in the spring of 1817 had been duped by one of the most energetic of the government secret agents, William Oliver, to lead a ‘rising’ of a few hundred stocking knitters and weavers at Pentridge in Nottinghamshire were convicted of sedition and sentenced to be hanged and – in the modern 19th century – quartered, though in the end they were just hanged until dead.
The rising had from the beginning been a trap set by the home secretary, Lord Sidmouth, to smoke out artisan revolutionaries before they could do damage. Wordsworth and Coleridge bought the government’s line, and defended the politicians for stamping on the spirit of insurrection before it grew into a godless Jacobinical hydra. But along with the horrified Hazlitt, a younger generation of their admirers – including the poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley – recoiled and wrote angry verses denouncing the apostasy.
With the knowledge that the government was waiting for a pretext to use its muscle, the organizers of reform meetings took great care not to oblige them. So when, in the summer of 1819 while Cobbett was away in America, a mass meeting was called at St Peter’s Fields on the outskirts of Manchester, the organizers – the Manchester Patriotic Union Society – took every precaution to ensure that the assembly would be peaceful. No opportunity would be given to the forces of ‘order’ to represent the meeting as a bestial, Jacobin mob bent on pillaging property and tearing down Christian civilization. ‘It was deemed expedient,’ wrote the weaver Samuel Bamford in his account of what quickly became known as the Massacre of Peterloo, ‘that this meeting should be as morally effective as possible, and that it should exhibit a spectacle such as had never before been witnessed in England.’
The crowd of some 50,000–60,000, gathered from all over the northern counties, duly appeared on 16 August in an orderly procession beneath banners for ‘Universal Suffrage’, some of them singing Primitive Methodist anthems, more like a revival meeting than a revolution. But the local magistrates were not interested in awarding marks for good behaviour. They were out to break the meeting. Among the speakers were the white top-hatted ‘Orator’ Henry Hunt and Samuel Bamford. Orders were given to the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry – merchants, manufacturers, publicans and shopkeepers – to arrest Hunt, which was done in short order: they roughed him up and pulled his trademark white hat over his head. But in cutting a way through the crowd, the yeomanry trampled a small girl who happened to be in the way of their mounts and killed her. At that point they found themselves surrounded by furious demonstrators, hemming in the horses and showering them with abuse. The yeomanry began to panic; regular cavalry – hussars – were sent in to try and extricate them. They did so with sabres unsheathed, slicing a path through the tight-packed people. A desperate rush to escape the troops ensued. Eleven people were killed; 421 seriously wounded, 162 with sabre cuts. At least 100 of the hurt were women and small children.
Bamford described the mêlée with poetic economy:
The cavalry were in confusion: they evidently could not, with all the weight of man and horse, penetrate that compact mass of human beings; and their sabres were plied to hew away through naked held-up hands, and defenceless heads; and then chopped limbs, and wound-gaping skulls were seen; and groans and cries were mingled with the din of that horrid confusion. ‘Ah! ah! for shame! for shame!’ was shouted. Then, ‘Break! break! they are killing them in front, and they cannot get away … For a moment the crowd held back as in a pause; then was a rush, heavy and resistless as a head-long sea; and a sound like low thunder, with screams, prayers, and imprecations, from the crowd-moiled … and sabre-doomed, who could not escape.
Lord Sidmouth congratulated the Manchester magistrates on their firmness. William Wordsworth appears to have felt much the same way. Others were nauseated by what had taken place, comparing it with the worst atrocities inflicted by European absolute despots on their populations. There was something evil about Peterloo, which for many mocked the pretension of the government to be upholding British traditions against innovation. Peterloo was not, the critics believed, a British event. Shelley was in Italy but that didn’t prevent him from writing a savage anti-government poem, ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ (‘I met Murder on the way/He had a mask like Castlereagh’), which marked his divorce from the older generation of poets.
In the shocked aftermath of Peterloo the radicals themselves divided into those like ‘Orator’ Hunt, cheered on the streets of London by 300,000 people as he was taken to his appeal hearing, who felt it was important to persist with lawful, constitutional change, and other less patient types who had been driven over the edge. Arthur Thistlewood, for example, a down-at-heel gentleman radical who had planned the Cato Street conspiracy (to assassinate the cabinet and attack the Tower of London, the Bank of England and parliament), was the perfect subject for a show trial followed by execution and government repression. By the end of 1820 most of the leaders of the democratic movement – Sir Francis Burdett, ‘Orator’ Hunt and Thomas Wooler – were in prison. Since 1819, when the Six Acts were passed, magistrates had the right to search houses for seditious literature or arms and to ban meetings of more than 50 persons, and a new stamp duty of sixpence put most popular publications safely beyond the reach of literate working men and women.
This was the moment when William Cobbett reappeared from America, bearing (until he dumped them in Liverpool) the bones of Tom Paine. Cobbett had obviously inherited Paine’s mantle as the People’s Friend. As a crowd-puller and the man who could articulate anger the people’s way, he was desperately needed. But something odd had happened to William Cobbett. Instead of mobilizing against the repressive Six Acts, he decided to mobilize his loyal following against tea. Roasted wheat or American maize, he told them over and over, is much better for you. Instead of attacking the infamy of Peterloo, he attacked the infamy of potatoes. Instead of honouring the memory of Paine, he went on at numbing length about his new currency policies and the ‘Jew dogs’ who had turned London into the ‘Jew Wen’. A pity, he thought, that England couldn’t return to the sensible policy of Edward I and make them wear badges.
With the tribunes of the people out of harm’s way or, like Cobbett, self-destructed, and with a measurable improvement in the economy, the government could congratulate itself that a British revolution had indeed been nipped in the bud. But theirs was an unmerited and unwise complacency. The shoots of anger had been clipped, but the roots of anger ran deep. Bewick, for one, had not been pacified. The last straw for him was the cynicism with which Wellington and Castlereagh, the foreign secretary, had allowed Britain to be hitched to the heavy wagon of pan-European policing, orchestrated by the Austrian foreign minister, Klemens von Metternich, at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. To do the bidding of foreign despots while remaining obstinately deaf to the cries of Britons was, for Bewick, a dangerous as well as a morally reprehensible policy. Waxing prophetic, he warned that the oligarchs and aristocrats and bishops had
sinned themselves out of all shame. This phalanx have kept their ground, and will do so, till, it is to be feared, violence from an enraged people breaks them up or perhaps, till the growing opinions against such a crooked order of conducting the affairs of this great nation becomes quite apparent to an immense majority, whose frowns may have the power of bringing the agents of government to pause upon the brink of the precipice on which they stand, and to provide in time, the wise and honest measures, to avert the coming storm.
Bewick was writing in the 1820s, a few years before his death in 1828, and the sustained note of moral urgency he strikes was typical of the decade, notwithstanding its deceptively quiet politics. They were the years when, from the west of Ireland to Bewick’s Newcastle, town halls, chapels, assembly rooms and taverns were filled to overflowing with earnest crowds, often addressed by evangelical preachers. The targets now were not so obviously political as religious and social. In Ireland they included the de
livery of the promise, made by Fitzwilliam 20 years earlier, to remove the ban on Catholics taking public office and standing for parliament, the great aim of the Catholic Associations led by the charismatic Kerry lawyer and landlord Daniel O’Connell. It was a movement with which Dissenting, Nonconformist religion in England and Scotland now made common cause, since they sensed that their adversaries were indeed the same. In the industrial towns a new, largely middle-class campaign for parliamentary reform, launched in Birmingham by the banker Thomas Atwood, tapped into the atmosphere of moral crusade. In 1824, a cause that might have been dear to Bewick’s heart was consummated when the Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals (Royal, when Queen Victoria became its patron) was established. By parliamentary statute, it became an offence to inflict gross cruelty on cattle being driven to Smithfield. But the same act also outlawed the traditional pastimes of bull-baiting and November bull-running – one of the staples of popular village life, especially in the Midlands. When a bull-run was held at Stamford in Lincolnshire, despite the new law, it took a company of dragoons and police to enforce the suppression.
The army of righteousness was very much on the march, and their most successful crusade was the abolition of slavery. Originally a Quaker speciality, the abolitionist cause had swollen into a great evangelical campaign that crossed party and confessional lines. Although it had to contend with some crude working-class racism it had strong popular support in Yorkshire and Lancashire, and it was at Oldham in 1832 that Cobbett finally announced his own conversion to the cause. The abolitionist George Thompson, who risked his life lecturing against slavery in the United States, claimed to have spoken to 700,000 in Liverpool alone.
