A History of Britain, Volume 3 (2 page)

But it would all be worth it, Pennant and West implied, because a trip to the true Britain was not just a holiday; it was a tutorial in the recovery of national virtue. The British needed roughness because they had wallowed too long in vicious softness. Inspecting all those Roman ruins, they had doomed themselves to follow the notorious example of that empire’s decay. Long before they had lost America, the Jeremiahs said, Britons had lost themselves. Old British virtues had surrendered to modern British vices. Liberty had been perverted by patronage; justice blinded by the unforgiving glare of money; country innocence contaminated by city fashion. The ‘Ancient Constitution’ that had kept the British free had degenerated into what its critics called ‘Old Corruption’ or, more bestially, ‘The Thing’. The triumphalists of empire had supposed that commercial robustness and Protestant plainness would immunize Britain from the usual laws of imperial decadence. But trade had become a euphemism for the crude gouging of revenue, enforced by British redcoats, or for the brutal traffic in African bodies. And God and history had inflicted their punishment at Saratoga and Yorktown.

The antidote to rot was horror. ‘Horrid’ was – along with ‘bristling’, ‘shaggy’ and ‘precipitous’ – one of the terms of choice in the promotional literature of Romantic British travel. At Falcon-Crag in Lakeland, West promised, ‘an immense rock hangs over your head and upwards, a forest of broken pointed rocks, in a semicircular sweep towering inward, form[ing] the most horrid amphitheatre that ever eye beheld in the wild forms of convulsed nature.’ At the Falls of Clyde, an obligatory stop on the itinerary of the British sublime, according to another gentleman travel
writer,
Thomas Newte, ‘the great body of water, rushing with horrid fury seems to threaten destruction to the solid rocks that enrage it by their resistance. It boils up from the caverns which itself has formed as if it were vomited out of the lower region.’ But these frightening experiences were not just perversely organized as holidays in hell; they were a spa for the sensations. The agitation of the senses was meant to shock the visitor out of the jaded appetite and torpor that was eating away the national fibre. The crystal waters of Cumbria, Cymru and Caledonia would be the cure for the diseases, moral as well as metabolical, of empire. In the uplands, away from the noxious filth and polluted air of the metropolis, Britons would be able to breathe again. They would start a new life.

Everything was to be stood on its head. The forces of ‘progress’ – Romans, Plantagenets – were now to be thought of as the bringers of greed and brutish power. Contemplating the archaeology of defeat brought the traveller into communion with lost worlds of old British virtue, an antiquity that might actually serve as a template for the future. The stone circles and Iron Age terraces that bore the footprints of a Britain flattened by the Romans; the shattered Welsh forts blitzed by Edward I; the ruined abbeys dispossessed by Thomas Cromwell and then burned by Oliver Cromwell – all became invested with tragic eloquence. As early as 1740 the antiquarian William Stukeley’s
Stonehenge: A Temple Restor’d to the British Druids
had argued that far from being the bloodthirsty barbarians described by Caesar, the Druids had actually been the descendants of one of the lost tribes of Israel, transplanted to Britain to create a new Promised Land, and had survived as the priestly guardians of an ancient and sophisticated culture. Their Celtic tongue was not just the original British language but the fountainhead of all non-Latin European languages.

Suddenly, being British was not the same as being English. Dolbadarn Castle, in the north Welsh fastness of Gwynedd, where Owain Goch, the son of the last independent Welsh prince, Llewellyn ab Gruffydd, took on the juggernaut army of Edward I, became a place of pilgrimage. Initially those who found their way there were Welsh antiquarians like Pennant, eager to reclaim their patrimony as the ‘original Britons’, but soon enough Romantic English sympathizers followed. The shattered piles of masonry silhouetted against the dark sky were seen (and painted) as incomparably more ‘feeling’ than the brutally intact Plantagenet castles like Conwy and Harlech, called ‘the magnificent badges of our subjection’ by Pennant. Carrying their copies of Thomas Gray’s epic poem, ‘The Bard’ (1757), reciting the last curses hurled at the oncoming king by the last blind poet to survive the Plantagenet
extermination,
Snowdonian thrill-seekers would peer into the ravines and shudder as they imagined the bard hurling himself headlong in a gesture of suicidal defiance. If they were very lucky they might be invited by the likes of Sir Watkin Williams Wynn to an eisteddfod, one of the gatherings at his country seat of Wynnstay in Denbighshire, featuring choirs and old, preferably blind, harpists like John Parry who would sing the tunes and lyrics of his forebears. From the mid-1750s a group of London Welsh calling themselves the Cymmrodorion met in taverns, and between rounds of strong ale, committed themselves to rescuing those epics and ballads from oblivion by writing them down and publishing them.

Wherever they looked, the Romantic enthusiasts of rough Britain believed, there were lessons to be learned that confounded the equation of cultivation with nobility. It was in the places furthest from corrupting fashion, in the heart of Britain’s oldest landscapes – the landscapes which gave ‘Capability’ Brown nightmares – that truly modern marvels were to be beheld. In 1746 a builder called William Edwards had attempted to throw a single 140-foot stone bridge across the river Taff. After two collapses, by 1755 he had succeeded – no one quite knew how – and the bridge was still standing. By the late 1760s and 1770s, the Pontypridd was being compared in prose and verse eulogies to the Rialto in Venice as a ‘monument of the strong, natural past and bold attempts of Antient Britain’.

William Edwards was an exemplar of this old-new Britain: a survivor from a rude world, but also a native
genius
. For now, that word was being used in both its ancient and modern sense, to mean someone who was rooted in a particular place
and
someone who was sublimely inspired. It followed, then, that a voyage of British discovery would have to happen as close as possible to the landscape that had protected and sheltered the true nature of Britain. And to do that Britons would first have to get off their high horse. It was only by direct contact with the earth of Britain that romantic tourists could expect to register, through their boots and in their bones, the deep, organic meaning of native allegiance. To be a patriot meant being a pedestrian.

Of course, the fashionable landscaped park had encouraged the estate-owner and his family to take a stroll along the rambling path, beside a serpentine pond or towards an Italianate pavilion, with the prospect of arriving at a poetic meditation, courtesy of Horace, Ovid or Pope. But the new walking was not just physically strenuous but morally, even politically, self-conscious. Picking up a stick, exiting the park, was a statement. In 1783 when John ‘Walking’ Stewart, the most prodigious of all the Romantic trampers, left India – where, in a 20-year career, he had served successively as East India Company writer, soldier and a minister of native
princes
– he was bidding farewell to empire in more than the territorial sense. He seems to have become a kind of Indo-Scottish
saddhu
, a holy walker, making his way through the sub-continent, across the Arabian desert and finally home via France and Spain. Before he set off again for Vienna and then the United States and Canada, ‘Walking’ Stewart became a minor celebrity – a fixture at Romantic suppers, and pointed out in St James’s Park. The writer Thomas De Quincey, who knew him, was also in no doubt of the levelling implications of walking. When he calculated (a little dubiously) that William Wordsworth must have walked 185,000 miles, the figure was meant to advertise the poet’s moral credentials – his down-to-earth understanding of ordinary people and places. At the height of the revolutionary crisis in France in 1793, during the reign of Terror, John Thelwall, the son of an impoverished silk mercer, who had become a radical lecturer and orator, would publish his eccentric verse and prose narrative of a walk around London and Kent, entitled
The Peripatetic
(1793) – a footsore glimpse of the lowly and the mighty.

Not everyone was ready for the sight of ‘men of taste’ taking to the roads. The first guide expressly written for the ‘rambler’ in the Lakes, complete with information on footpaths, and carrying the revolutionary implication that the landscape across which they tracked was a common patrimony (and not just the resort of beggars and footpads), would not appear until 1792. Some 10 years earlier, when the German pastor Karl Moritz walked through southern England and the Midlands, he was constantly greeted with suspicion and disbelief. His host at Richmond ‘could not sufficiently express his surprise’ at Moritz’s determination to walk to Oxford ‘and still further’ and when, on a June day, he became tired and sat down in the shade of a hedgerow to read his Milton, ‘those who rode, or drove, past me, stared at me with astonishment, and made many significant gestures, as if they thought my head deranged’. The landlord of the Mitre at Oxford and his family made sure he had the clean linen that befitted a gentleman, but were bemused by his determination to walk. Had he not arrived in polite company, they admitted, he would never have been allowed across the threshold since ‘any person undertaking so long a journey on foot, is sure to be looked upon … as either a beggar, or a vagabond, or … a rogue’.

Moritz presented himself as an innocent foreigner in a country evidently mad for speed, its citizens hurtling along the turnpike roads in carriages and on horses. Yet he also knew that walking made him, if not a democrat, then someone who openly and perversely rejoiced in his indifference to rank. It brought him into direct contact with the salt of the earth: a female chimney sweep and a philosophical saddler who recites
Homer:
the academy of the road. And it showed off the pedestrian as a new kind of man, a Man of Feeling. In that same year, 1782, he would finally have been able to get his hands on the work that rapidly became the Bible of thoughtful pedestrians, the
Confessions
(1782) of the French political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and, as an appendix, the
Reveries of the Solitary Walker
, 10 disquisitions each in the form of a walk.

For Rousseau, a walk had always been away from, as much as towards, something. The
Confessions
– made available to the public through the good offices of an English friend and devotee, Brooke Boothby – recorded his first decisive illumination as he walked from Paris to Vincennes to see his then friend, the writer and philosopher Denis Diderot. Somewhere along that road it dawned on Rousseau, as he walked away from the city, that the entire values of the polite world were upside down. He had been taught to assume that progress consisted of a journey from nature to civilization, when that transformation had, in fact, been a terrible fall. Nature decreed equality; culture manufactured inequality. So liberty and happiness consisted not in replacing nature by culture, but in precisely the reverse. Towns, which imposed an obligation to conduct one’s life according to the dictates of fashion, commerce and wit, were a web of vicious hypocrites and predators. Towns enslaved; the countryside – provided it too had not been infected with urban evils – liberated. Towns contaminated and sickened their inhabitants; the country cleansed and invigorated them. Rather than education assuming its mission to be the taming of children’s natural instincts within the pen of cultivated arts and manners it ought to do precisely the opposite – preserving, for as long as possible, the innocence, artlessness, frankness and simplicity of those instincts. No books, then, before 12 at least; instead, romps in the fields, stories beneath the trees and lots of nature walks.

All of which made Rousseau’s brief, dizzy stay in London, in the winter of 1766, disconcerting to guest and host alike. He had come to England, on the warm invitation of the Scottish philosopher David Hume, because he had run out of asylums and because he had been reliably informed that the country was the sanctuary of liberty. In absolutist, Catholic France his writings had been burned by the public hangman. In his Calvinist native city of Geneva he had not fared much better, falling foul of the local oligarchy when he had rashly and publicly sided with challenges to their monopoly of power. For a brief period he had found an idyllic refuge, together with his mistress, Thérèse Levasseur, on the islet of St Pierre, near Bienne, where he went for botanizing walks or rowed a little boat. His last shelter was the estate of an English-naturalized Swiss, Rodolphe Vautravers, but the long arm of authority, in the shape of the
Bishop
of Berne’s proscription for irreligion, caught up with him. Finally, he accepted Hume’s invitation and travelled with him across the Channel.

It was not a pleasure trip. Rousseau arrived at Dover seasick, wet, tearful and cold. In London, where Hume attempted to introduce him to like-minded friends including the actor David Garrick, Prospective Men and Women of Feeling lined up to offer gushing admiration, tearfully sympathetic consolation, discreet applause. But although he came out of his shell enough to drink in the appreciation, and began to appear in his pseudo-‘Armenian’ peasant’s costume of fur cap and tunic, it took no time at all before Rousseau’s unique gift for alienating his well-wishers surfaced. When David Hume attempted to recommend him to George III for a royal pension, it was perversely interpreted by Rousseau as a conspiracy. It probably didn’t help when, to pre-empt Rousseau’s excuse that babysitting his dog, Sultan, prevented him from going to the theatre in Drury Lane to meet the king, Hume locked the dog on the inside of the apartment, and, with Rousseau on the outside, insisted on taking him to the show. What Hume thought was a good-natured attempt to bring Rousseau a harmless degree of benign public attention was perceived by its intended beneficiary as a plot to subject him to ‘enslavement’ and ridicule. Rousseau even believed that Hume was the author of a hoax invitation from Frederick the Great urging him to come to Prussia. (The writer was actually Horace Walpole.) An ugly public row ensued. Hume himself began to realize, depressingly, that his guest was perhaps a little mad.