The Years of Endurance (7 page)
Moralists deplored what was happening and in the spread of depravity and atheism predicted revolution. Instead of thinking of national well-being, statesmen and men of substance, they argued, were becoming obsessed with sordid considerations of profit-making. By 1798 there were 100,000 men and women and 60,000 children working in the cotton mills, many of the latter indentured by Poor Law Guardians to masters who treated them little better than slaves. Yet the national conscience was not asleep but only overwhelmed by a multiplicity of new activities and openings for money-making. A great people, firmly launched on the ocean of untrammelled enterprise, was bound to commit errors, even crimes. Liberty had her economic gales as well as political. Yet the sea of endeavour was wide, and it was open. There was room to correct mistakes.
For all the while an eternal transformation was taking place. As popular energy, overwhelming the barriers of restriction, swept away obstructions to the free flow of trade and talent
2
the competi
tion
1
Some kept themselves awake at night by singing " Christians Awake
!
"
—Fremantle, I, 51.
2
The strength of the pop
ular tide that
was flowing towards complete freedom of trade is illustrated by a letter written in 1767 by Lord Kinnoul to a young Scottish laird, Thomas Graham of Balgowan, destined many years
later to become Wellington's right-hand man in Spain. " We see by daily experience the fatal effects of politics upon industry and manufactures ; and the great towns of Birmingham, Sheffield and Manchester feel the superior advantage of not sending members to Parliament, and likewise that of not being hampered with the fetters of the exclusive privileges which corporations enjoy. By these means genius has free scope, and industry is exerted to the utmost without control, check, or interruption."—
Lynedoch,
4.
of ruder types tended to outproduce and undersell those already established. The genteel merchants of Bristol, mellowed by a hundred years of wealth and refinement, were no match for the products of pushing, hungry Liverpool, whose merchant captains were content with a seventh of the wages paid to their haughtier rivals. Those who had their way to make by a natural process caught up and ultimately outdistanced those with an inherited start. At first sight this seemed to threaten a progressive debasement of culture and social standards: the tough and the shover ever tending to shoulder out the gentleman and the fair dealer. Yet, as one bucket in the well of commerce fell, the other rose: the national passion for emulation consta
ntly
replanted the standards of quality in fresh soil; the greasy, aproned, clog-footed mechanic of one generation became the worthy merchant of the next. And if the process of cultural rise was not so quick as that of fall, the artistic and intellectual reserves of society were so vast that they could afford a good deal of dilution.
For in culture England had never stood higher, not even in the age of Shakespeare or that of Wren and Newton. Samuel Johnson had died in 1784 and Goldsmith ten years earlier. But in 1790 Reynolds, Romney, Gainsborough, Opie, Rowlandson, Stubbs and the young Lawrence were all painting. Cowper, Crabbe and Blake were writing poetry, Boswell was putting the last touches to the greatest biography in the language, and Gibbon had two years before finished its grandest history. Wordsworth was born in 1770, Coleridge in 1772, Turner, Jane Austen and Charles Lamb in 1775, Constable in 1776, Hazlitt in 1778, de Quincey in 1785 and Byron in 1788. Shelley was still to be born in 1792 and Keats in 1795. North of the border, where Adam Smith of Glasgow had established an international reputation as the first political economist of the age, Edinburgh was just entering upon her brief but glorious flowering of native wit as the northern Athens. Raeburn was beginning to paint, Dugald Stewart to lecture, Walter
Scott was studying the
romantic lore of his country and an Ayrshire ploughman, by name Robert Burns, had published his first volume. And in the realm of science the achievements of late eighteenth-century Britain were equally remarkable. Joseph Black the chemist, Hunter the founder of scientific surgery, Priestley the discoverer of oxygen, and Jenner who conquered the scourge of smallpox, are among its great names. It was an age of gold that had the Adam brothers as its architects, Cosway as its miniaturist, Hepplewhite and Sheraton as its cabinetmakers. In the drawing-rooms of London and of the lovely pastoral mansions that looked out on to the dreaming gardens of Repton and Capability Brown
1
a society moved, brocaded, white-stockinged and bewigged, more gracious, more subtle, more exquisitely balanced than any seen on earth since the days of ancient Greece.
Yet this society was governed by no fixed and absolute laws, confined by no insurmountable barriers. Under its delicate polish lay a heart of stout and, as the event was to prove, impenetrable oak. Its people were tough to the core. " I shall be conquered, I will not capitulate," cried Dr. Johnson as he wrestled with death, guiding the surgeon's blade with his own hand. The Duke of Portland at 68 underwent an operation for the stone and was seven minutes under the knife without a murmur. Diminutive Jacob Bryant, the great classical antiquary, asked by his sovereign what branch of activity he was most noted for at Eton, answered to the astonishment of his auditor: " Cudgelling, sir, I was most famous for that." Young girls wore sticks of holly in their bosoms to teach them to hold their heads high, old Edge of Macclesfield at 62 walked 172 miles in under fifty hours for a bet; the King rose daily at
4
a.m. and spent three hours on the government dispatch boxes before taking his morning ride in Windsor Park. And the common people were tougher, if it were possible, than their betters. At Shirley village in Bedfordshire the penny barber told a traveller that he never used a brush since his customers, complaining of the tickling, preferred to be shaved dry.
They were fighters to a man: a race as game as the cocks they
1
" The laying out of the ground in a natural way is carried to greater perfection in England than in any part of Europe. In foreign countries . . . the taste of gardening is forced and unnatural. . . . They constrain and counteract nature ; we endeavour to humour and assist her."—Lord Kinnoul to Thos. Graham,
Lynedoch
5.
backed in the crowded, stinking pits of Jewin Street and Hockcliffe. When challenged they fought to the death. " Look, you, sir," cried old General Sherbrooke to a fellow-officer who had offended him, " my hands are now behind my back, and I advise you to leave the room before they are brought forward, for if they once are, I will break every bone in your body." " Why, my little man," asked one of the East India Directors of twelve-year-old John Malcolm at his interview for a commission, " what would you do if you met Hyder Ali? " " Cut off his heid," came the instant reply.
Boxing was the favourite pastime of the nation: all seemed ready at a moment's notice to roll up their sleeves for a mill as they had done on the sward under the billyard at Harrow or behind the church wall in the village at home. The last years of the eighteenth century saw the classic age of the Fancy: of John Gully and Robert Gregson, the Lancashire g
iant, Cribb and Belcher and Gentl
eman Jackson: the ringside under the open sky with its packed, democratic crowd lying, squatting and kneeling around it and the top-hatted seconds shadowing the combatants in their shirt-sleeves. The young lordlings of the day were never so proud as when they forgathered with their favourite champions at Zimmer's Hotel or took their lessons in the manly pastime in Gentleman Jackson
's
rooms in Bond Street. When the Jew Mendoza on April 17th, 1787, beat Martin in the presence of the Prince of Wales he was brought back to London with lighted torches and to the strains of Handel
'
s
" See the Conquering Hero Comes."
Yet in all this brutal bruising—and in those days of gloveless,
timeless contests a dead man someti
mes lay on the sward before the
sport was done—there was curiously little bullying. " In Eng-
land," wrote Southey's visiting Spaniard, " a boxing match settles
all disputes among the lower classes,
and when it is over they shake
hands and are friends. Another e
qually beneficial effect is the
security to the weaker by the laws of honour which for
bid all undue
advantages; the man who should aim a blow below the waist, who
should kick his antagonist, strike him when he is down or attempt
to injure him after he had yielded, would be sure to experience the
resentment of the mob who on such occasions always assemble to
see what they call fair play which they enforce as rigidly as the
Knights of the Round Table and the laws of Chivalry."
1
It was not
1
Espriella
III, 311.
unfitting that this intensely individualistic, quarrelsome and stubborn race should have this rough and equalitarian sport to even harsh tempers and teach the sobering lessons of defeat.
At the heart of the English character lay a fund of kindliness. Though in the mass rough and often cruel, and passionately addicted to barbarous sports like bull-baiting and cock-fighting, they led the world in humanitarian endeavour. It was an Englishman who in the 'seventies and 'eighties, at extreme risk and personal inconvenience, travelled 50,000 miles visiting the putrid, typhus-ridden jails of Europe; and it was Englishmen who at the close of the century first instituted organised opposition to cruelty to children and animals. But nothing so well illustrates the slow but persistent national impulse to mitigate inhumanity as the popular condemnation of the slave trade. This movement ran directly counter to the immediate material interests of the country; it none the less steadily gained strength from its inception by a handful of Quakers in the 'sixties until at the end of the century it was espoused by the Prime Minister himself and the overwhelming majority of thinking Englishmen.
The transatlantic slave trade had grown up to meet the needs of Britain's plantations in the West Indies and American colonies. Its headquarters was Liverpool, whose merchants imported seven-eighths of the negroes brought from Africa to America. In return for the slaves sold to the planters, they brought back to England sugar, rum, cotton, coffee. Thus the whole of the country indirectly benefited from this horrible traffic The slaves, many of whom were kidnapped, were taken from the West African coast across the " Middle Passage " to the West Indies in crowded slavers, loaded three slaves to a ton, the poor chained wretches being packed so tightly between decks that they were often forced to He on top of one another. The mortality both of seamen and human cargo was appalling, but the smaller the consignment of slaves that arrived, the better the price paid for the remainder. For the laws of supply and demand, when allowed to find their true level, always operated beneficially!
As is the way with conservative-minded people whose interests are vested in an abuse, every reason was found to justify the continuance of the traffic.
1
Liverpool merchants and their parliamentary
1
Bos
well in his
Life of Johnson
went so far as to claim that " to abolish
a
status which in all ages God has sanctioned and man has continued, would not only be robbery to an innumerable class of our fellow subjects, but it would be extreme cruelty to the African savages, a portion of whom it saves from massacre or intolerable bondage in their own country and introduces into a much happier state of life. . . . To abolish that trade would be to * shut the gates of mercy on mankind.
5
" Many honourable men at the time agreed with him.
2
Rochefoucauld (p. 31) noted with astonishment that the sideboards of the most aristocratic houses were furnished with chamberpots which, after the departure of the ladies, were resorted to freely by the gentlemen as
the
drink circulated.
representatives declared that, were a measure passed to regulate the miseries of the Middle Passage, the West Indian trade would be ruined, Britain's commercial supremacy lost and the Navy be left denuded of trained seamen.
Yet having once been brought to the not very observant notice of the British people, the slave trade was doomed. For with all its barbaric survivals, Britain was a land of decent folk: of men and women with conscience. And because of the blend of freedom with order in British political institutions, the dictates of that conscience, though slow to mature, were ultimately given effect. Barbarous laws and customs
2
—men hanged in public for petty crimes, lunatics chained to the wall knee-deep in verminous straw, animals tortured at Smithfield and in the bull-ring—of these and their like there were plenty, but they were continually being ameliorated by the advancing pressure of public opinion. Gradually but instinctively a nation of freemen turned towards the light. That age-long process was the justification of their freedom.