A History of Britain, Volume 3 (15 page)

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 ceremony 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.

It was a time hungry for heroes, for as much as Britain loved him, the king was old and increasingly mad. The Prince of Wales was a fat, often drunken lecher; his brothers, like the Duke of York – who had been the sole official representative at Nelson’s funeral – just as dissolute. No one was surprised, only appalled, when it was revealed that, to please his mistress, the courtesan Mary Ann Clarke, the duke had been awarding military promotions to anyone on her ‘A’ list. Scandals like this put a face on that ancient radical bugbear ‘Old Corruption’ and gave an opportunity, even in the midst of war, for the critics to find their voice again. In 1807, the same London crowds who had turned out in hundreds of thousands to pay their last respects to Nelson now cheered the patrician Sir Francis Burdett, as well as an even more unlikely hero, the naval commander Thomas Cochrane – ex-privateer, notorious eloper, jailed (and then escaped) for stock-exchange fraud. This pair were the new radical candidates for the two Westminster seats, one of which had, until his death in 1806, been held by Charles James Fox.

Dissent – political and religious – had not, in fact, gone away. It was just busy with moral causes untainted by the accusation of flirting with the enemy. In 1807 a huge petitioning campaign, driven by a Nonconformist army, mobilized not in barracks but in chapels and meeting houses, had succeeded in making the slave trade illegal in the British Empire, though not in freeing slaves in British colonies. A year later Burdett and Cochrane swept away the official Whig candidates on a programme of impeccably patriotic revivalism. Give us back the True Britain, they said, the Free Britain, the Britain that had been stolen by the dukes and the dandies. Give us our birthright: annual parliaments, a secret ballot, manhood suffrage! Figures from the recent past, like Major Cartwright, resurfaced from a silence imposed by intimidation, their voices louder than ever. With them on their banners were figures from the not-so-recent past – Robin Hood and the Civil War parliamentarian
John
Hampden, rediscovered as the heroes of an alternative history; the people’s history.

When this new army of Christian soldiers and Magna Carta warriors marched to win what they insisted were the ‘natural rights’ of blacks and Britons, they seemed unstoppable. By contrast, the performance of the armies commanded by the dukes kept on stopping. The nursery rhyme about the ‘Grand Old Duke of York’ refers to one of his many wartime fiascos, the latest occurring on the Dutch island of Walcheren in 1809 when an enormous expedition of 40,000 troops, supposedly laying down a beachhead on Napoleonic Europe, was cut down by fever and had to be ignominiously evacuated. In its first few years the campaign against the French in Portugal and Spain, known as the Peninsular War, seemed, equally, to specialize in gallant defeats and pyrrhic victories. Frederick Ponsonby wrote to his mother, Lady Bessborough, after the British won the battle of Talavera with droll disenchantment: ‘We had the pleasing amusement of charging five solid squares with a ditch in front. After losing 180 [troopers] and 222 horses we found it was not so agreeable and that Frenchmen don’t always run away when they see British cavalry, so off we set and my horse never went so fast in his life.’ One of Wordsworth’s most stinging poems was written in despair at the ‘Convention of Cintra’, when it seemed that Britain had abandoned the Spanish resistance. None of this bad news, of course, prevented the Prince of Wales from throwing a party at his grand London residence, Carlton House, featuring a 200-foot-long table into which had been carved an artificial canal for wine, its banks lined with silver and gold, and the wine driven by miniature pumping machines; a small-scale industrial revolution engineered to amuse the Quality. Only Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, would draw huge and enthusiastic crowds, bonfires and marching bands whenever he scored a victory.

But in 1810, there was no inkling of a Waterloo around the corner, except in India and the Caribbean. Napoleon, in fact, seemed largely unbeatable. The Spanish guerrillas deserved admiration, but the French controlled all the great cities of the peninsula from Madrid to Seville. One by one his adversaries had made their peace. The Habsburg Emperor of Austria, Francis I, had even married his daughter to the man once reviled as the Corsican ogre. King Frederick William of Prussia and Tsar Alexander of Russia had both made treaties. Unchallenged on most of the continent, but thwarted in his invasion plans and frustrated by the Royal Navy from making any serious inroads on the empire, Napoleon attacked Britain in a campaign designed to cripple the island economy. Sealing off continental Europe against its exports he created the embryo of a common market on the other side of the Channel. It very nearly worked. European industry,
protected
by the blockade and driven by the technical innovations of French technology (in chemistry and engineering for example), surged. In Britain, with export demand on the floor, a deep slump set in. Handloom weavers, who had been heavily in demand as factory-spun cotton yarn surged in output, were now the first victims of the sharp downturn of trade. Unemployment and food prices soared at the same time.

In 1811 and 1812, well-organized gangs calling themselves the soldiers of ‘General Ludd’s Army’ after their originator, a worker named Ned Ludd, smashed hand-powered machines in the Midlands and factory machines in Lancashire. The Luddites, who signed themselves ‘Enoch’, did their work with sledge-hammers. Letters were sent to employers, especially those notorious for cutting wages, that General Ludd’s soldiers were coming their way. Legislation was enacted making machine-breaking a capital crime, but it persisted almost as long as the economic crisis.

In 1812 a ruined businessman, driven to distraction, shot and killed the prime minister, Spencer Perceval, at point-blank range in the antechamber of the House of Commons. To the horror of the governing classes, the assassin was noisily toasted in the inns of London, Birmingham and Manchester. So when, at last, in 1813 news arrived of Wellington’s spectacular victories in Spain and of the destruction of Napoleon’s Grande Armée in the Russian snows, no one with any sense took much comfort from the happy, drunken, patriotic uproar. Some 12,000 regular troops – more than Wellington had to use against the French – were stationed at home to deal with the marches, riots and machine-wrecking that had become a regular feature of British life. After Wellington’s decisive defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, when a quarter of a million demobilized soldiers were thrown on to an already depressed labour market, the situation became even more serious. The one ray of light amidst the gathering economic gloom ought to have been lower food prices, now that the blockade and the artificially high demand of the war had gone. But in response to complaints from landowners that their incomes would collapse, a Corn Law had been passed, letting in foreign grain only when home prices hit a designated ceiling. The effect, as intended, was to keep British farmers’ profits artificially high. So bread remained punishingly dear at a time when the Quality looked as though it were embarking on an orgy of house-building, each construction more extravagant than the last. Brighton Pavilion, the Prince Regent’s Indo-Sino-Moorish funhouse, was being rebuilt, sporting iron columns and a gaslit ballroom, at the same time as 45,000 paupers, many of them bearing scars from the battlefields of India, America and Europe, were hammering on the doors of Spitalfields poorhouse.

For some of the angriest, most articulate radicals, these shocking contrasts were an insupportable obscenity. Thomas Bewick’s old sparring partner, Thomas Spence, had taken to making much, symbolically, of his slight stature, casting himself as Jack and calling his latest publication
The Giant Killer
. Shortly before his death in 1814, he did some revolutionary sums, calculating that since the estimated rental value of the houses and estates of England and Wales was £40 million and stock another £19 million, and since the population of the country was 10½ million, each taxpayer was shelling out about £6 annually to support ‘the drones in luxury and pomp’.

Even Spence’s fury, however, pales beside the wrath of William Hazlitt. He had finally given up his dreams to be a painter and was scraping along as a writer, in almost any genre, for any newspaper that would pay him. He served an apprenticeship in the new job of parliamentary reporter, but also reviewed theatre performances, art exhibitions, even boxing matches, and in so doing transformed each of the journalistic media he tried. But his vocation in these bitter years was to attack the class he felt had turned Britain into a sink of corruption and unnatural social cruelty. What especially made his blood boil was to be told that the misfortunes of the poor were only to be expected in the shift from a wartime to a peacetime economy; just a structural dislocation – nothing, really, to get agitated about. Hazlitt, responding in a series of vitriolic essays in the
Examiner
, begged to differ: ‘Have not the government and the rich had their way in everything? Have they not gratified their ambition, their pride, their obstinacy, their ruinous extravagance? Have they not squandered the resources of the country as they pleased?’ And what had his old heroes – Wordsworth and Coleridge – to say about any of this? Nothing. They had become, to Hazlitt’s horror and disgust, Tories.

In 1816 he defined for his readers, in an unforgettably savage portrait of a country in pain, the character of a ‘Modern Tory’. He was, wrote Hazlitt (
inter alia
):

a blind idolater of old times and long established customs … A Tory never objects to increasing the power of the Crown, or abridging the liberties of the people, or even calls in question the justice or wisdom of any of the measures of government. A Tory considers sinecure places and pensions as sacred and inviolable, to reduce, or abolish which, would be unjust and dangerous … accuses those who differ with him on political subjects of being Jacobins, Revolutionists, and enemies to their country. A Tory highly values a long pedigree and ancient families, and despises low-born persons
(the
newly created nobility excepted), adores coronets, stars, garters, ribbons, crosses and titles of all sorts. A Tory … deems martial law the best remedy for discontent … considers corporal punishment as necessary, mild, and salutary, notwithstanding soldiers and sailors frequently commit suicide to escape from it … sees no hardship in a person’s being confined for thirty years in the Fleet Prison, on an allowance of sixpence a day, for contempt of the Court of Chancery … A Tory … is averse to instructing the poor, lest they should be enabled to think and reason … and reads no poetry but birthday odes and verses in celebration of the battle of Waterloo. A Tory … lavishes immense sums on triumphal columns … while the brave men who achieved the victories are pining in want. A Tory asserts that the present sufferings of the country … are merely temporary and trifling, though the gaols are filled with insolvent debtors, and criminals driven to theft by urgent want, the Gazette filled with bankruptcies, agriculture declining, commerce and manufactories nearly at a stand, while thousands are emigrating to foreign countries, whole parishes deserted, the burthen of the poor rates intolerable, and yet insufficient to maintain the increasing number of the poor, and hundreds of once respectable house-holders reduced to the sad necessity of soliciting admission into the receptacles for paupers and vagabonds …