1820

Disorder and stability in the United Kingdom

Malcolm Chase

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780719097461
  9780719087417
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526110411
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

Integrating in detail the experiences of both Britain and Ireland, 1820 provides a compelling narrative and analysis of the United Kingdom in a year of European revolution. It charts the events and forces that tested the government almost to its limits, and the processes and mechanisms through which order was maintained. This book will be required reading for everyone interested in late-Georgian and early nineteenth-century Britain or Ireland. 1820 is about much more than a single year. Locating the Queen Caroline divorce crisis within a broader analysis of the challenges confronting the government, it places that much-investigated episode in a new light. It illuminates both the pivotal Tory Ministry under Lord Liverpool and the Whigs (by turns febrile and feeble) who opposed it. It is also a major contribution to our understanding of popular radicalism and its political containment.

1 The United Kingdom in 1820

Prologue

On 1 January Joseph Farington rose at 8.20 a.m., feeling ‘very unwell’. This may explain why he failed to step outside his home in London’s Charlotte Street, as was his custom, to note the temperature. But he recorded in his diary that it was ‘a thick discoloured morng and day’. The temperature on rising on New Year’s Eve had been minus 3 degrees centigrade in a ‘thick frosty haze’. By Wednesday 5 January his thermometer read minus 8: he had last recorded a positive reading on 23 December. A highly regarded landscape artist and Royal Academician, the widowed Farington led a comfortable life sustained by a housekeeper and, we may safely assume, a fire burning in each grate of his home. Even so, when the distinguished sculptor Sir Richard Westmacott called on 2 January, Farington’s diary suggests the two men spoke only ‘of the coldness of the weather’.¹

London had the better of the weather. In Dumfries on 2 January thermometers slumped to minus 19 degrees. The lowest reported January temperature in the capital was minus 13 on 14 January, but mid-January temperatures between minus 15 and minus 23 centigrade were reported in a range of locations from Perth, south to Dorset.² Detailed aggregated temperature data for central England suggests that the mean monthly temperature for January 1820 – 0.3 degrees below freezing – was considerably lower than both the decadal means for both the first and second decades of the century, and the corresponding figures for 1819 and 1821. There would be no colder January until 1838.³

This ‘winter of uncommon severity’ was a constant thread in the correspondence of the novelist Walter Scott. Countess Cowper wrote to her brother of six weeks’ severe frost and recurring snow. ‘The frost is intense. The town is empty’, commented London diarist Charles Greville as the old year drew to its close.⁴ ‘The weather very cold, frost and snow’, recorded Francis Witts, a Gloucestershire parson, on 3 January, ‘the roads very slippery … [our] horse fell in the chaise in the streets of Tetbury’. Scheduled coach services were abandoned along many routes during the first fortnight of 1820. Others ran hours late, even with the traction of additional horses. The Humber estuary was impassable due to drifting ice floes and, inland, the canals and rivers which connected it to the midlands and Yorkshire were frozen, sometimes to a depth of 46 centimetres. The situation was similar at Stockton-on-Tees where the river, though tidal, was frozen until 23 January, and on the Clyde. Ships froze at buoys and jetties on the Thames, while at Deptford booths were erected on the ice, recreating the celebrated ice fairs of centuries past.⁵ Snow drifts more than two metres deep were reported in Wiltshire and Dorset, over three metres on the Glasgow road out of Edinburgh, and exceeding 3.6 metres in Gloucestershire.⁶ In western Ireland, rural protesters known as Ribbonmen exhibited ‘unparalleled audacity’ in Galway, ‘out every Night in some quarter or other of the County as the hard frost enables them to cross the bogs in every Direction.’⁷

The cold struck hard in even the most well-appointed homes. On 13 January in his Windsor Castle sickbed, George III suddenly ‘drew himself up in his bedclothes, and said “Tom’s a cold”.’⁸ Quoting Shakespeare’s King Lear, knowingly or not, was an instance of eerie prescience, for the octogenarian King had enjoyed pitifully few lucid moments during the past decade. A Hampshire diarist, Peter Hawker, noted 15 January was ‘the coldest day in the memory of any person I have met with’. Poole harbour was frozen solid. Hawker’s manservant, who had once crewed a whaler, ‘said it was quite equal to Greenland’.⁹ ‘This severe winter has taken away many old people’, William Wordsworth noted.¹⁰ Newspapers carried reports of weather-related deaths: a carter found dead, his horse’s reins still in his hands on the Great North Road in Yorkshire; farm labourers dead from cold in Devon; two children frozen to death on a Somerset baggage wagon; elderly Londoners discovered dead in homes ‘not having clothing, bed, nor fire’.¹¹ ‘Individuals able and willing to work are literally starving’, the Cork Chronicle reported in an item simply headed ‘The Weather – The Poor’.¹² A ‘temporary establishment for shelter to the homeless’ was set up in some empty London warehouses, while in parishes across Britain subscriptions were raised to alleviate escalating distress ‘in consequence of the severity of the season’. At its peak a Birmingham appeal was distributing over 11,000 litres of soup each week.¹³

More prosaically, provincial theatres opened ‘to dismal emptiness’.¹⁴ With the prolonged cold came a spate of fires as Britons struggled to keep warm. The most notable casualties were Birmingham’s Theatre Royal and Magdalen Hall, Oxford (where the water froze in the pumps of the fire-tenders).¹⁵ In Somerset William Baker, a currier, found that the impact of the frost was so great that ‘blackbirds, thrushes, and other small birds would scarcely fly from the banks as I came up to them’; at Bridgewater ‘the river [was] filled with ice, the country covered with snow, and the atmosphere dark and heavy’.¹⁶ Hawker noted that ‘dead rooks, small birds &c. were lying about in every direction, starved to death’ and, more shockingly, how two wildfowlers had ‘frozen to death in their punts’.

Of course the weather was not the sole topic of conversation. ‘Half the kingdom had colds’, recorded one diarist on 27 January, noting that Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, was killed by his.¹⁷ Charles Greville had just met the Prince Regent’s son-in-law, Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg: ‘his pomposity fatigues, and his avarice disgusts.’ Farington’s first visitor on New Year’s Day was a senior employee of Cadell & Williams, Farington’s publishers. He told him earnestly that the firm, ‘and many other of the principal Booksellers’, would stop producing cheap pamphlets. As 1819 had drawn to a close, in response to popular political unrest, Parliament had passed six acts severely curtailing both freedom of assembly and political publishing. Cadell & Williams were fearful of these new legal restrictions on publications. They were ‘an injury to trade’, he told Farington, expanding for good measure on the unpopularity of Lord Castlereagh, the leader of the House of Commons.¹⁸

Neither Farington nor Cadell & Williams could remotely be mistaken for political radicals. That the publisher of books such as The Literary Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds and Hannah More’s Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education entertained such views says much about the political mood at the turn of 1819 and of how generalised criticism of the Government had become. ‘What a state England is in!’ wrote the poet Percy Shelley two days before Christmas in a letter home from Florence to the journalist and critic Leigh Hunt. With it he enclosed a manuscript, probably of his sonnet now known as ‘England in 1819’.¹⁹ Written in response to the ‘Peterloo’ massacre, Shelley’s poem is arguably the most widely known literary work of the Regency.

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn,– mud from a muddy spring;
Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,
But leechlike to their fainting country cling
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow;
A people starved and stabbed in th’untilled field;
An army, which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless, a book sealed;
A senate, Time's worst statute, unrepealed,
Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

Shelley wrote this in Italy: distance from home as well as poetic temperament influenced the mood of the concluding couplet. After twelve lines of unrelenting gloom the poet dares to hope for change. Yet the vision is tentative, for a phantom lacks all material substance, it is a mirage; and even if the emotions evoked by its appearance produce physical changes, this illumining phantom only may emerge. Shelley’s sonnet is suffused with deep pessimism as much as with anger.

John Keats’ ostensibly apolitical ‘Ode to Autumn’ similarly reflected the prevailing mood of political powerlessness. The ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ it evokes is ambiguous in its portents. Keats thought not of ‘the songs of Spring’ but of a brooding, stifling autumn wherein the dominant human pose is inertia. The mood is one of oppressiveness as much as fecundity, a mood that any contemporary reader would have caught since the harvest of 1819 was far from bountiful. We shall never know if, as the critic Tom Paulin has argued, the opening line was intended as an allusion to ‘the mists and intricacies of the state’, a phrase John Milton used in his resolutely republican tract Eikonoklastes (1649), or perhaps to Satan, whom Milton characterised as a mist in Paradise Lost.²⁰ But it is difficult to shake off the sensation of brooding uncertainty that accompanies Keats’ absorption with autumn, an absorption so intense that the poet almost dare not contemplate what may follow.

Peterloo had changed everything. The casualty figures were shocking enough; but the unequivocal endorsement, by first the Government and then the Prince Regent, of the Manchester magistrates’ decision to send in the cavalry, gave the tragedy a black and enduring significance. In 1761 more than fifty had died in Hexham, Northumberland, during the suppression of an anti-militia riot. However, in the popular memory Peterloo was rapidly fixed as an unprecedented example of official violence and of the moral bankruptcy of aristocratic government. Furthermore, no Riot Act had been read at Manchester and the claim that the assembly was illegal was (as trials during 1820 would illustrate) highly contentious.

Many of Shelley’s and Keats’ contemporaries shared the belief that the immediate future was uncertain and potentially calamitous. In January 1820 the Scottish intellectual Sir James Mackintosh wrote gloomily of ‘a complete separation and enmity between the upper and lower ranks, the governors and the governed, the rich and the poor in society’.²¹ Lord Holland, a leading member of the Whig opposition in parliament, detected ‘a spirit grown up & growing every day throughout the country, against the nature & practice of our Government, & tending I fear to the separation of the Upper & middling classes of Society’.²² ‘The protection afforded to the Perpetrators of the bloody outrage of the 16th of August, clearly manifests a design to subvert the laws by those who are sworn to maintain them; and to establish on the ruins of the English Constitution, a military despotism’, one author declared.²³ ‘I compare the present time to the French Revolution’, shoemaker Allen Davenport told a meeting of London ultra-radicals, adding ominously ‘we must arm ourselves as they did’.²⁴ Politician Robert Ward, offered a ride along Pall Mall in the Duke of Wellington’s carriage, recorded with astonishment how Wellington locked all the doors and gave him an impromptu tutorial in defending themselves from attack. ‘“By leaning back you may fight a window better than a parapet wall.” This he accompanied with the appropriate action.’²⁵ For the poorest, it was almost impossible to see beyond the immediate recession. Lancashire weaver William Varley commenced his 1820 diary with, inevitably, a comment about the severity of the weather, ‘the poor weaver is now very hard put to it’. But in the same sentence he commented tartly on the ‘200 soldiers of Infantry and Cavalry’ garrisoned at Burnley: ‘these soldiers must be mentained if the poor weaver die in the looms.’ February opened with criticisms of the ‘unhuman and relentless masters of Burnley … but poor vassal remember that a day will come when these base fiends shall meet their certain doom.’²⁶

Neither the winter’s acute economic depression nor the memory of Peterloo alone created this mood. Since the 1790s, a radical political tradition distinct from ‘the friends of the people’, as the Whigs liked to be known, had ebbed and flowed, while domestic politics had grown increasingly truculent since the end of the wars against France and Napoleon. But what is extraordinary about the winter of 1819–20 is the extent to which public opinion had polarised. A future President of the Board of Control for India, John Cam Hobhouse, languished indefinitely in Newgate for contempt of parliamentary privilege. The ‘true practica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The United Kingdom in 1820
• 2 Winter’s end
• 3 Politics high and low
• 4 Easter risings
• 5 Late spring and early summer
• 6 Autumn
• 7 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index