London (139 page)

In Roman times roads had crossed the island like an iron framework. Then, neglected and overgrown, they had mostly been forgotten. Through the long centuries of the dark ages to the modern Stuarts and early Hanoverians, the roads of England were little more than prehistoric tracks and rutted Saxon lanes. In the case of the old Kent road from Dover and Canterbury along which young Eugene Penny had just travelled, the Roman road had remained in use, but its metalled surface lay buried so deep that even it appeared as nothing more than a cart track.

All that had now changed. The turnpike roads of the late eighteenth century were owned by private trusts and joint stock companies and run for profit, but with such success that within a generation they had covered much of the country. Sometimes they followed a straight Roman route, more often a curving Saxon path. Their surfaces were nothing like as sophisticated as those of the ancient world, but smooth and hard enough to permit a carriage to maintain a brisk and constant pace. Journeys that once took a day or two were now accomplished in hours. Entrepreneurs with fleets of express coaches rushed both mail and people out from London coaching inns to the furthest parts of the country. Suddenly the swelling capital was accessible to every town in the kingdom. It was, truly, both the return of Rome and the beginning of the modern age.

Yet the prospect that now greeted young Eugene’s eyes was not at all what he had expected.

The metropolis of London had continued to grow during George III’s reign, but it had done so mainly north of the River Thames. On the south bank, Southwark had grown, but only in a modest fashion. West of Southwark, though lines of houses were growing along the roads that led to Westminster Bridge, the great parish of Lambeth was still mainly orchard, market garden and field, with a scattering of timber yards along the waterfront; while further upriver, the old villages of Battersea and Clapham had only suffered the addition of some handsome villas and gardens belonging to prosperous merchants and gentlemen. Below Southwark, the riverside areas of Bermondsey and Rotherhithe were turning dingy with acres of crumpled brick housing; yet even this soon gave way to open marshland. Further downstream, the village of Greenwich with its huge white palaces was hardly altered at all.

But across the Thames, northwards, westwards, eastwards, the mighty city was spreading like a leviathan. Or so Eugene had heard. For he now encountered a problem which neither Stuart nor Tudor, nor even Roman had ever known. The city was invisible.

“That, sir,” the coachman said, “is a London fog.”

It lay over the city like a dark grey pall. Judging by its hazy edges, it seemed to Eugene that the great cloud of dirt was spreading outwards; and indeed as they came down the old Kent road it came out to meet them. By the time they entered Southwark borough, the sky was dark and the houses were becoming indistinct in an oily, greenish, mist through which their lights could only signal with an orange glow. By the time they reached the High Street, the coach had slowed and Eugene could not even see the heads of the leading horses. When they turned into the courtyard of the George Inn for all he knew he could have been entering the gateway to hell itself.

The boat made a soft, grating sound as it emerged from the fog and came to rest on the mud below the stairs on the river’s northern bank. One of the men climbed out and turned round to take his leave of the other who remained in the boat, his strange tall hat slouched on his head, his gnarled hands resting on the oars.

“Goodbye Silas,” the standing figure said softly.

The other, for a moment, made no response; when he did, his voice was deep as the river, thick as the fog that shrouded it. “What’ll you call her?”

“The baby? Lucy.” His wife had chosen the name. He liked it.

“So you don’t want to join me, Will?”

“I don’t like what you do.”

“You ain’t getting rich yourself, are you?”

“I know.”

Silas spat between his feet, and began to shove off. “You’ll never go nowhere,” he grunted, and a moment later he and his dirty old boat were swallowed up in the mist.

But I still wouldn’t care to go where you’re surely going, William Dogget thought, as he started to make his way home.

Penny’s instructions from his father had been specific: as soon as he arrived in London, he was to go at once to the house of his godfather, Jeremy Fleming. But, judging that the fog made this impossible at present, Eugene decided to spend the night at the inn. He was cheerful enough. This inconvenience, he told himself, would only delay the start of his new life by a few hours.

What Eugene did not yet realize was that the fog which covered London was an integral part of the new life he was seeking. For no sooner had England resumed the standards of its Roman past than it had forged ahead into the great expansion called the Industrial Revolution.

It is often supposed that Britain’s Industrial Revolution was a matter of huge factories manned by armies of the oppressed; and it is true that in the north and Midlands big iron foundries, steam-powered cotton mills, and coal mines which sent children underground did exist. But in reality, the Industrial Revolution was led by England’s traditional woollen cloth trade and followed by cheap manufactured cottons. Though mechanical spinning and weaving made vast expansion possible, this manufacturing was mostly carried out by small masters with modest works and sweatshops. But they all used coal: and the volume of smoke and soot from the city’s now myriad fires became so great that in the right atmospheric conditions its dark vapours settled like a blanket, trapping even more fumes below; and then, as a mist arose, thickened into this choking, impenetrable horror in which men muffled their faces and a thief could walk beside you a hundred paces unseen. So was born the ‘pea-souper’, or London fog.

In the warm glow of the George’s main parlour, Eugene could forget about the evil presence of the fog outside. The innkeeper brought him a steak and kidney pie and a bottle of porter, as dark beer was often called, and chatted to him from time to time. Eugene looked eagerly at the faces around him. Being a coaching inn, there were all kinds of travellers there – coachmen in their heavy coats, merchants, a brace of lawyers, a clergyman, a gentleman returning to the country, together with numerous locals, mostly shopkeepers.

It was about nine o’clock that the curious figure entered. He came in alone and ordered a tankard of porter, carrying it silently to a corner of the room where he sat by himself. There was a momentary hush as he entered. The smooth surface of conversation seemed to open, and people edged away from him; then it closed as quickly as possible in his wake. He was somewhat shorter than most men, but very heavy-set and he moved with a surly slowness. His big, heavy coat was of an indeterminate colour; and on his head he wore a high, black and shapeless woollen hat folded into a rim which touched his thick, black eyebrows. His eyes were big and angry; under them, the skin gathered into dark rings. The overall effect was one of deepset menace. And whether it was the pallor of his skin, or the strange, webbed hand which held the tankard, it seemed to Eugene as if this apparition had emerged from the depths of the dark and foggy river itself.

“Who is that?” he enquired of the innkeeper.

“That?” the man replied, with a look of disgust. “He is called Silas Dogget.”

“What does he do?” Penny asked.

“You don’t want to know,” the other answered, and would say no more.

Not long afterwards, Eugene retired to bed, glad to think that with any luck he would never see Silas Dogget again.

It looked as if a riot might begin.

The wind had got up at dawn and blown the London fog away; only a tiny residue of grime over the city was left to mark its passing. The day was bright with a tingling breeze, and the fair weather no doubt encouraged the crowd of four hundred people who were gathered in front of the handsome house in Fitzroy Square to hear the figure standing in the open upstairs window proclaim his shocking message.

“Do we believe,” he cried out, “in the Brotherhood of Man?” The crowd signified, with a roar, that it did. “Do you
acknowledge
–” this last word, said with particular emphasis, was Zachary Carpenter’s trademark as an orator – “I say, do you
acknowledge
that every man born has rights? Isn’t that common sense? Aren’t these the Rights of Man?” As a murmur of recognition greeted this, he positively exploded: “And do those
inalienable
rights not include,” he hammered the next words out like a drumbeat: “No taxation without re-pre-sent-a-tion?” And his small stout body and large round head fairly bounced.

It might seem strange that these doctrines which came straight from the writings of Tom Paine, the great propagandist of the American Revolution, should be proclaimed in a London street. Yet medieval Englishmen had said much the same thing in the days of Wat Tyler’s revolt and plenty of men nowadays possessed grandfathers who could remember old Levellers from the days of England’s Civil War. The free House of Commons, the Puritans, the Roundheads, the now independent Americans and the radical English were all different streams that had branched out from the same old river of freedom. King George III might have been furious with the Americans for breaking away, but many of his ordinary subjects had read Paine and sympathized with the plucky colonists.

“Did I make a mistake,” Zachary now asked the crowd, “or did Parliament abolish slavery?”

The crowd assured him that this was correct. Slavery had been outlawed within England since 1772, and, thanks to the efforts of reformers like the great William Wilberforce, the slave trade had more recently been forbidden even in Britain’s far-flung possessions overseas.

“Are you or are you not free-born Englishmen?”

The crowd let him know, with another roar, that they were as English as roast beef.

“Then why is it,” he cried, “that here, in this parish of St Pancras, we are treated no better than slaves? Why are free men trampled by a tyranny? Do you
acknowledge
that this is so?”

They did. They did with a bellow that shook Fitzroy Square.

Carpenter’s accusation was absolutely true. Even now, the old controversy over who should control the parish vestry, which had so infuriated Gideon Carpenter back in the days of King Charles, had still not been settled. Although the ancient area of the twenty-five city wards was still ruled by the mayor, aldermen and the now largely ornamental guilds, the vast and spreading metropolis outside had no central authority. Peace was preserved, streets paved, the sick and the poor were provided for by the parish. The parish built and organized. And of course to pay for it, the parish also taxed.

The parish of St Pancras was huge. Its base extended westwards from Holborn for over a mile; but from this base it swept up through city streets, then suburbs, then open field and sprawling village all the way to the hills of Hampstead and Highgate four miles to the north. Within this great domain now lived some sixty thousand souls, who were ruled by the parish vestry.

There were two kinds of parish nowadays. In one kind, the vestry was elected by at least some proportion of the householders. These vestries were termed “open”. In the other – a minority, but a significant one – the vestry, whose composition was laid down by Parliament, nominated itself without any reference to the people of the parish. Such vestries were said to be ‘close’ or ‘select’. And in this year of Our Lord 1819, thanks to a powerful aristocratic clique within it, the mighty parish of St Pancras which had been open had just been closed by Act of Parliament.

“This,” Carpenter thundered, “is an iniquity.”

Zachary Carpenter was a well-known figure. By trade he was a furniture maker, and a good one. Having served his apprenticeship with the firm of Chippendale he had briefly worked as a journeyman for Sheraton, but then set up on his own, specializing in the miniature domestic writing desks known as davenports. Like many cabinet-makers, he operated in the great parish of St Pancras, where he had a workshop with three journeymen and two apprentices; and, like many craftsmen and small employers, he was a fervid radical.

“It’s in the blood,” he would say. For though the details were vague, the family tradition of Gideon Carpenter’s career as a Roundhead still remained. Zachary’s own father had been a religious reformer. Zachary had vivid memories of being dragged out of bed when a boy and taken to the great hall up in Moorfields where old John Wesley himself was still preaching his message of pure and simple Christianity. But the subject of religion had never interested him much: Zachary sought purity, but he wanted to find it in the institutions of men.

He was eighteen when the French Revolution, with its promise of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, had broken out, and twenty-one when Tom Paine’s mighty tract
The Rights of Man
, with its demand for ‘One Man One Vote’ was published. Within a week of reading it, he had joined the London Corresponding Society, whose tracts and meetings were soon providing a network for radicals all over England. By the age of twenty-five, he was gaining note as a speaker. He had been speaking ever since.

“And isn’t this parish just an example,” he cried out, “of the great injustice done in every constituency in Britain, where free men may not vote and members of Parliament are chosen, not by the people but by a clutch of aristocrats and their creatures? It is time for this infamy to end. It is time for the people to rule.” After this incitement to revolution, he turned and went inside, to wild applause.

Something was certainly peculiar about the scene. Fitzroy Square, designed by the Adams brothers, lay in the parish’s most fashionable, south-western corner. Odder still was the presence, clearly visible at Carpenter’s shoulder, of the owner of the house, who had been nodding in warm agreement all the time. Oddest of all was the fact that this person was that epitome of aristocracy, the noble Earl of St James himself.

It was seventy years now since Sam had become an earl. Indeed, as the years of his childhood passed he had gradually forgotten his early years in Seven Dials. Vague whispers, little flashes of memory would come to him sometimes, but he had been told so firmly and so often by his stepfather Meredith that he had been rescued and returned to the state that was properly his, that he came to believe it. By the time he was a young man he had actually forgotten about Sep, and if now and then he had been discreetly observed by a costermonger, he had not even been aware of it. As for his life since he came of age – the Earl of St James had been too busy enjoying himself to think of anything else. He was enjoying himself now, supporting his radical friend Carpenter.