The Years of Endurance (5 page)

In the two decades before the war with revolutionary France farming was the first hobby of educated Englishmen. From the King—" Varmer George "—who contributed to the
Agricultural Magazine
under the pseudonym of Robinson and carried a copy of Arthur Young's
Farmer's Letters
on all his journeys—to Parson Woodforde, who recorded daily his horticultural activities and his observations on the weather, the pursuit of husbandry gripped their eminently practical minds. Great lords would pay
£400
or more for the hire of one of Mr. Bakewell's rams, and yeomen would club together to establish cart-horse and ploughing tests. The country gentleman who did not look after his estate lost as much caste as he who shirked his fences in the hunting field. Practical, hardy, realist, the landowners of England were a source of astonishment to their Continental neighbours, who did not know at which to wonder more: aristocratic absorption in clovers and fat cattle or the intelligence with which farmers and peasants, who abroad would have been regarded as no better than beasts of burden, conversed oil the principles of their calling.
¹

This common passion had one important political consequence. It helped to unify the nation and, by accustoming men of all classes to act together, gave them cohesion in time of trial. It made not for theoretical but for practical equality. It was one of the influences that constantly tempered the aristocratic government of the country. Too many currents of robust popular air broke in on the senate and salons of eighteenth-century England for the atmosphere to remain hot-house.

They blew not only from the field, but from the jury-box, the hustings and the counting-house. In this land of paradox a lord might find his right to lands or goods questioned by process of law

¹
Captain Fremantle drove me in his gig to see Mr. Wenar's farm and his famous fat oxen for which he every year gets two or three prizes—he was not at home, but his daughter as fat as the cattle, tho' a civil girl, did the honours of the mansion which is a very ancient half-ruined house—she showed me the fat beasts which are fed some on oil cake and some on turnips, and look like elephants. It is only in this country that one may see a man like Mr. Wenar, who is visited and courted by Dukes and Peers, dines at their table, and returns their dinners, and all this because he can fatten oxen better than his brethren, the other farmers. A German Baron could hardly believe this."—
Wynne Diaries,
III, 72.

courts where the final word lay with the decision of twelve fellow-countrymen chosen from the general body of the nation. Strong though the opportunities of blood were, there was no profession to which a man of humble birth might not aspire. Dr. Moore, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1783 to 1805, was the son of a grazier; Lord Eldon, Lord Chancellor with one brief break from 1801 to 1827, the son of a coal-factor's apprentice.

The way these strange islanders chose their rulers outraged alike foreign prejudice and logical formulas. An English election had to be seen to be believed. It was not that the political constitution of the country was democratic: it was on the face of it overwhelmingly aristocratic. The House of Lords was hereditary. Of 558 members of the House of Commons, 294—a majority—were returned by constituencies with less than 250 members. Many of the newer and larger centres of population had no representation at all, while an under-populated county like Cornwall still returned a tenth of the English and Welsh members. 157 M.P.s were nominated by 84 local proprietors, mostly peers, and 150 more on the recommendation of another 70.

Yet the curious fact remained that the English parliaments of the eighteenth century represented not inaccurately the trend of popular political feeling. Not all the power and bribery of a few great lords, who regarded the Whig rule of England as something permanently ordained by heaven, could prevent the younger Pitt from carrying the country against the prevailing parliamentary majority in the famous election of 1784. The effect of corruption, openly acknowledged and shamelessly displayed, largely cancelled itself out. Those who sought entry to Parliament, being English, were individualists to a man. They were there for their careers or local prestige, or out of a sense of personal duty. They were seldom much interested in abstract ideas nor inclined to press them to inhuman extremes. They were often childishly sensitive to what their fellow-countrymen—and particularly their neighbours— thought of them. The very illogicality of the electoral system inclined them to bow to any unmistakable expression of public opinion; unlike both ideological despots and the representatives of a more rational democracy, they felt the intellectual weakness of their position and claimed no sanctity for their point of view.

An example of this was the regard paid to county as opp
osed to
borough elections. The 92 Knights of the Shire were the elite of the House and carried far more weight than could be explained by their numbers. When they were united—an event, however, which only happened in a time of national emergency—no government could long withstand their opposition. This was because their election by forty-shilling freeholders gave them a real right to speak for England: they represented the substance of her dominant interest and industry. They were no placemen or carpet-baggers but independent gentlemen openly competing with their equals for the suffrages of their neighbours—of those, that is, best fitted to judge their character and stewardship. Before a county election sturdy freeholders rode into the shire town from every side to hear speeches from the rival candidates, to be canvassed by them in market hall and street, to march in bannered and cockaded processions behind bands of music, and to eat and drink at their expense in the leading inns and taverns. The most important of all county elections— because it represented the largest constituency—was that of the great province of Yorkshire: on the result of this the eyes of Ministers and even of European statesmen were fixed.

In such contests, and even in those of the close borough, there was a wealth of homely plain speaking and even homelier conduct. The candidates, however splendid their lineage and estates, had to take their turn of lampoons, brutal jests and rotten eggs and run the gauntlet of a fighting, drunken, cheering, jeering crowd before they could hope to enter the portals of Westminster. One did not have to be an alderman or an hereditary burgess or even a forty-shilling freeholder to fling a dead cat at the hustings. The right to do so during an election was regarded as an inalienable privilege of every Englis
hman: the only check the right o
f every other subject to return the compliment. At the Wycombe election in 1794 Lord Wy
combe was thrown down in the mu
d and Squire Dashwood, another candidate, lost his hat and almost his life. " Elections are certainly of some use," wrote radical John Byng, " as affording lessons of humility and civility to a proud lord and a steeped lord-ling."

The rowdiest of all elections was that of Westminster. Here, by one of the incalculable illogicalities of the English constitution, something approaching manhood suffrage prevailed. Ever
y adult male with his own doorw
ay and a fireplace on which to boil his pot had the right to record his vote. Like Yorkshire Westminster was regarded by statesmen as a political test: in its noisy humours—its riots, its stuffed effigies, its grand ladies cajoling porters and draymen with kisses—one could feel the pulse of England.

But perhaps the most startling manifestation of English licence was the power of the mob. England had no police force, and it was regarded as a mark of effeminate namby-pambyism to wish there to be one. Facing a mob was like facing a fence or standing up to an enemy in the ring: a thing a gentleman took in his stride. One did it with courage and good humour, and then the monster—which, being English itself, respected courage and good nature—did no great harm. True in 1780 the London mob surrounded the Houses of Parliament, took drunken control of the capital for four days and burnt about a tenth of it down. But even this excess was regarded as part of the price of popular freedom. And in its crude, barbarous way the mob did—under guidance—act as a kind of rough watchdog of the national liberties and even, on occasion, of morality. Thus, when the House of Commons in its dislike of the disreputable John Wilkes outraged the principles of freedom of choice and speech which it was its duty to uphold, it was the constancy of the mob to the cause which had brought Strafford to the scaffold that shamed and finally defeated the advocates of despotism. And when an aspiring lady of the frail sisterhood buried her cat in hallowed ground, it was not a dignitary of the church but the hand of the London mob which rebuked her, noisily flinging the corpse back through her window within two hours of its interment.

Liberty outside Parliament was reflected by liberty within. For all the power of the great nominating lords and borough-mongers and the allurements of the Treasury, there were more independent members in the House than is possible under the rigid Party machinery of to-day. In a major issue it was not the Whips but men's consciences that turned the scale in the lobbies. Minorities could make themselves felt. A great speech could still decide a hard-fought debate: members were not the tied advocates of particular interests obeying mandates issued in advance. They gave their constituents not so much rigid obedience as unfettered judgment.

Nor did the complexion of the House discount the rise of talent. Within its narrow range the old parliamentary system fostered it. Again and again it recruited to the
country's service the strongest
motive power in the world—the force of genius untrammelled by the rule of mediocrity. A young man of brilliance, who had the g
ood fortune to attract the notic
e of some great peer, might be set on the high road to the Front Bench at an age when his counterpart to-day is laboriously overloading his brain and memory to satisfy the Civil Service Commissioners. Pitt with £300 a year was Prime Minister at twenty-four. Probably at no other time in British history could Edmund Burke, a man of genius without any of the arts of the demagogue and lacking both birth and independent fortune, have become a lifelong legislator. Like Macaulay and Gladstone after him, he entered Parliament by the back door of a rotten borough and a discerning aristocrat's approval.

B
ehind every English exercise of li
berty was the underlying conception of law. It was because the law was there, guaranteeing the freedom of every man against every other, that the English were able to allow and take so much licence. The law did not coerce a man from acting as he pleased: it only afforded redress to others if in doing so he outraged their rightful liberty or the peace of the community. Every man could appeal to the law: no man could legally evade it. Not even the King: perhaps it would be truest to say in the eighteenth century, least of all the King. The squire who rebuked George III—a very popular monarch—for trespassing on his land became a national legend.

In England there was no
droit adm
inistratif:
no sacred principle of state with which to crush the cantankerous subject. The official had to produce the warrant of law to justify his every action. If he exceeded his authority, whatever his motives, he suffered the same penalty as though he had acted as a private citizen. There was no escape from the law: it was like divine retribution and might overtake the transgressor at any moment of his life. Joseph Wall, for all his fine connections, was hanged at Newgate in front of a cheering mob for having twenty years before, while Governor of Goree, sentenced a mutinous sergeant to an unlawful flogging that caused death.

Trial by law was conducted in public. Judges were appointed for life and were irremovable save for gross misconduct. Issues of fact were decided by a jury of common citizens. Any man arrested could apply to the Courts for an immediate writ of
Habeas Corpus
calling on his custodian to show legal cause why he should be detained. In all doubtful cases the prisoner was given the benefit of the doubt and acquitted. These were the main pillars of English justice, together with an unpaid magistracy of local worthies, the absence of a paid constabulary and a traditional distrust of the standing army which was always kept by Parliament—alone capable of voting funds for its maintenance—at the lowest strength compatible with national safety, and often a good deal lower. The duties of police were performed by the general body of citizens serving in turn as constables on a compulsory parish rota or paying substitutes to deputise for them during their year of office. In the larger towns this ancient system had long broken down. But the national distrust of despotism long made reform impossible.
¹

There was another principle of freedom scrupulously honoured in England. It was the legal sanctity of property. It was individual ownership, it was held, that enabled a man to defy excessive authority. Without a competence of his own to fall back on the subject could be bribed or intimidated: a John Hampden without an estate seemed impracticable to the English mind.
²
The guardians of English liberty were the gentlemen of England whose hereditary independence protected them from the threats and guiles of despotism. They were tyrant-proof. That men might be rendered servile through wealth as well as through poverty had not yet dawned on them.