A History of Britain, Volume 3 (16 page)

Much of what he said was inaccurate and unjust, since the Whigs were hardly less, indeed perhaps more, narrowly aristocratic, and there were certainly many Tories – Coleridge and Wordsworth, for example – who were deeply moved by the plight of the poor, but their solution was to rekindle a sense of social and moral responsibility in the governing classes, not to challenge their legitimacy. In 1808 Wordsworth organized an appeal for the children of two smallholders who had died in a terrible blizzard, and took in one of the daughters himself at his home at Dove Cottage. But it was exactly this personal, traditional charity that Hazlitt judged so patronizing and sentimental. When Coleridge proposed to deliver what he called (reverting to the old Unitarian days, when Hazlitt had sat wonder-struck by his eloquence) a ‘Lay Sermon’ on the ills of the time, even before he had seen it he exploded at its presumptuousness. Reading it would not have abated his anger. Hazlitt took exception to men who had once advertised themselves as the mouthpieces of the common people now consenting to the gagging of those who wished to combine in their own defence; or who were prosecuted for expressing discontent, like his own friend Leigh Hunt, who was jailed for describing
the
Prince Regent as ‘this “Adonis in loveliness” … a corpulent man of 50! … a violator of his word, a libertine …’

Wordsworth, whom Hazlitt still revered as a great poet, was perhaps the most culpable of all, for he had accepted a post from his local magnate, the Earl of Lonsdale. While Hazlitt was scribbling furiously away in John Milton’s old lodgings at 19 York Street, Westminster, a holy place of the British republican tradition, Wordsworth was living in his new home at Rydal Mount supported by the earl and by his sinecure as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland. It was even known that the old country tramper, the friend of beggars and poor veterans, had got himself up in knee breeches and silk stockings to go and dine in London with his noble superior, the Commissioner of Stamps. Hazlitt’s reaction was acid: ‘Cannot Mr Wordsworth contrive to trump up a sonnet or an ode to that pretty little pastoral patriotic knick-knack, the thumbscrew … On my conscience he ought to write something on that subject or he ought never to write another line but his stamp receipts. Let him stick to his excise and promotion. The world has had enough of his simplicity in poetry and politics.’

Undeterred, in 1818 Wordsworth campaigned in the
Kendal Chronicle
for the earl’s sons when the radical Henry Brougham had the unmitigated gall to contest one of the two county seats of Westmorland, both of which had been safely in the family’s gift for generations. Lonsdale and his family, the Lowthers, were everything that Hazlitt hated. They owned hundreds of thousands of acres of north-country land, an estate so big that it was said the earl could walk across the Pennines from the Cumbrian to the Northumbrian coast without ever leaving it. They owned coal mines, and in the middle of the worst slump in living memory the earl was building a vast Gothic Revival castle, Lowther Park, with fantastic turrets and timbered halls – his very own dream palace of Merrie England, Walter Scott-style.

Hazlitt was not alone in his contempt for this synthetic version of tradition, which pretended to embody the old paternalistic virtues while acting out its fantasies through cupidity and brutality. Thomas Bewick was now an elderly gentleman, the successful author and illustrator of
History of British Birds
(1804) and
A General History of Quadrupeds
(1790). Although still full of creative energy, his eyes had been so badly damaged by the fine work of his wood engravings that he needed help from his son and pupils to execute, in 1818, his long-cherished project of an illustrated
Aesop’s Fables
(1813). He continued to insist he was no Frenchified revolutionary. Unlike Hazlitt (who had gone on a grief-stricken four-day bender at the news of the battle of Waterloo) he was no admirer of
Napoleon.
But Bewick was astonishingly forthright about ‘the immense destruction of human beings, and the waste of treasure, which followed and supported this superlatively wicked war’. And now it was over, he thought Britain had become a plunder-land for an unholy marriage of old titles and new money: ‘The shipping interest wallowed in riches; the gentry whirled about in aristocratic pomposity.’ For Bewick, theirs was a system of power sustained, above all, by lies about the true nature of the countryside with which they affected to be intimate, but from which they were actually cut off behind the elegant gates of their Palladian or Gothick mansions. Bewick was displeased, for example, to be told that his engravings of cattle and sheep commissioned for landowners should resemble, not what he had drawn from sight, but paintings of them (done by other artists, who were happy to flatter for a fee) shown to him in advance: ‘… my journey, as far as concerned these fat cattle makers, ended in nothing. I objected to put lumps of fat here and there where I could not see it … Many of the animals were, during this rage for fat cattle, fed up to as great a weight and bulk as it was possible for feeding to make them; but this was not enough; they were to be figured monstrously fat before the owners of them could be pleased.’

The very opposite of this deceit was pictured in Bewick’s own
Quadrupeds
: the bulls of Chillingham, a herd of wild cattle preserved in woodlands owned by the Earl of Tankerville but prized and cherished by Bewick’s close friend, the engraver and agriculturalist John Bailey, who lived at Chillingham. The cattle, with their dazzling white coats and black muzzles, were said to be the survivors of an ancient, undomesticated breed that had wandered the woods of Britain before the Romans had arrived. For Bewick and Bailey, these creatures were the
real
John Bulls of Britain: untameable, unpolluted by cross-breeding, unsuitable for fancy farm shows. In order to make his drawings without them either disappearing back into the woods or, more alarmingly, charging him, Bewick had to wait patiently in cover by night and then approach at dawn, crawling on his hands and knees, in an attitude that, his own account makes clear, was as much one of respect, wonder and happiness as of prudence. The result, an image of massive power, is the great, perhaps the greatest, icon of British natural history, and one loaded with moral, national and historical sentiment as well as purely zoological fascination.

Rural authenticity in an age of lies mattered deeply to such as Bewick. And he responded, like tens of thousands of others, to someone who seemed to exude it: the two-legged, bellowing bull called William Cobbett. Cobbett was pure country, although his appeal went straight to town. Born in 1762, he had grown up working on his father’s farm at
Farnham
in Surrey, moving to London at the age of 19, where he worked as an attorney’s clerk. But his real apprenticeship and his education had been served, along with countless other ploughboys, in the king’s army in New Brunswick. He had then spent some years in Philadelphia teaching and writing before returning to England in 1800 with a reputation already made for pithy, popular journalism, couched in the language of country people. Astoundingly, he met with Pitt and William Windham, his spymaster, who were interested in subsidizing a pro-government daily paper that Cobbett called
The Porcupine
, which would shoot its quills at the Friends of Peace and anyone suspected of disloyalty. For three years at least Cobbett dutifully banged the patriotic drum, urging the government to give the people inspirational popular histories with role models like Drake and Marlborough, and promoting (to the horror of evangelicals) as martial training violent sports like ‘single stick’, in which men with one arm tied behind their backs whacked each other with cudgels until ‘one inch of blood issues from the skull of an opponent’.

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.